Post by Admin on Jan 1, 2021 18:37:09 GMT
Author: Mirrordance
Summary: Past and present collide, as Legolas visits the tomb of Aragorn, and ponders all that he has lost and gained in his friendship with mortal beings
Rating: T
Characters: Legolas, Elrond, Arwen
Warnings: Canon Character Death
Minas Tirith
Fourth Age, 120
The Death of the King
# # #
Just because one does not age, Legolas conceded to himself, it does not necessarily mean that one remains perpetually adept at a certain thing forever.
Sneaking around, for one, was something he suddenly realized he was no longer accustomed to.
Thousands of years, he berated himself, thousands of years he had honed unparalleled skills of stealth in his father’s once-dangerous forests, skills he brought to bear in service to the Fellowship of the Ring and the War that ended their struggles, and then devoted to cleaning up after the evil remnants that still sometimes marred their world. It was a wealth of experience, yielding a mind and body that was made for winning a war.
But I am out of practice, it seems...?
For the thousands of years were swiftly – all too swiftly – eroded by the last, scant few years of the blissful peace he and his friends have worked so hard to achieve.
I have rendered myself irrelevant.
He, a lifelong soldier, had helped craft a world without a need for one of this caliber anymore, thank the gods. Sometimes though, stealth still came in handy and this was one such instance.
This evening, he mourned the loss of that once-effortless, easy sneakiness, very, very much (aside other things he mourned – he killed the thought).
He used to do this unthinkingly, he thought with distaste. Now he had to take more care...
For it was difficult indeed to break into Elessar’s final resting place undetected.
The first obstacle was the Fen Hollen, that forbidding, almost always closed door on the sixth level of the city. It was well-fortified, well-guarded, and access was permitted to a scant few. This little list included Evenstar the dead King’s widow of course, their daughters, and undoubtedly their son, the new ruler.
Legolas was aware he could wrangle one such permission for himself easily, but – aside from what’s the fun in that? - he did not want to bother the family in their period of mourning, nor did he want any spectacle for this visit.
I just want to say goodb-
The second obstacle, beyond the door was the Rath Dinen, that miserable, narrow, deathly silent street that led to the Houses of Gondor’s stone-cold, dead nobility. It was a dead road leading to a dead hall of cold stone filled with the tombs of dead people. Dead, dead, dead, dead things shrouding dead people.
He reached Elessar’s tomb with no incident, and he reveled in the minor victory of it. He snickered to himself. Out of practice or not, the only thing that mattered was the outcome, and though he needed more effort now than he had in his youth, he still successfully achieved what he had set out to do.
That is, to be alone with his friend.
He walked around the stone slab, contemplating that it was a final resting place befitting a great king. The workmanship was exquisite and why wouldn’t it be; they had at their disposal, the finest smiths of the Kingdom, not to mention the considerable talents of a dwarf who was one of the greatest craftsmen to ever walk their lands.
He shook the thought of Gimli Son of Gloin away, that strange, lovely being who had somehow become indispensable to him, and yet was slated to be the next one he will mourn-
Beautiful lines, he thought appreciatively, of the arches carved into the stone slab, Intricate work. Masterful, especially how they blended into the branches of a strong, stout white tree.
He let his eyes drift up from the stone slab, and imagined his gaze snaking up the columns, arches and branches that adorned the sides of his tomb as they wound their way up to the high relief sculpture on the surface. It was a king at rest - draped in finery, crowned and armed with vambraces and a sword but with eyes closed, posture fixed in final, peaceful, eternal repose.
It’s a decent likeness, Legolas conceded.
A more just representation would have given Elessar’s face minute lines and scars though, he thought critically. Something that would say more of his character and experiences. Maybe a few stray strands of hair, nothing that would take from his dignity, for his hair was always in some measure of disarray (even when he became a King) and they never dented him anyway.
It is an awful likeness, Legolas suddenly decided. Cold and unfamiliar, something Aragorn never was.
“Aragorn,” he whispered brokenly into the quiet of the hallowed halls, and suddenly the man was flesh and blood in his mind, a drastically different being from the immovable stone before him.
This is a stranger, and the man I know is gone forever.
He gasped for the ache of the loss of it, and how the stone was such a poor, pathetic substitute, even for all of that it was a masterpiece-
A masterpiece.
The draping work on the fabric is particularly exquisite, he thought as he took a deep, shaky breath and steeled himself. This is difficult work, the folds seemingly silken, following the laws of the physical world so accurately that they really did look as if they followed the shape of the body beneath.
The body-
He felt sick to his stomach.
He folded forward, hugging himself about the middle, all the while thinking it would be one of the worst things ever, ever, if he should be ill all over the tomb of the greatest of the kings of men.
Would they arrest me for that? he wondered inanely, for these Gondorians could be such sticklers for protocol.
His throat worked hard and he swallowed repeatedly around a lump lodged there, which easily could have been either today’s lunch, or unshed tears, or unsaid words.
He fell to his knees, and reached out by instinct toward the rock slab, so that he would fall no further. But it was freezing cold in his palms, and the thought of this, of Aragorn beneath this frigid thing and his warmth and light smothered, made Legolas’ stomach clench all the harder.
He recoiled away and ended up on his rump, curled slightly on the ground at the foot of his good friend’s well-constructed tomb.
A masterful work, he decreed, over and over in his head. Exquisite. Everlasting.
Stone to last the ages, long beyond life. Long beyond people who will mourn or perhaps even longer than people who will remember-
He placed a hand over his ears, and in muffling his hearing, he created the sound of rushing air to cover the silence that his tormented mind filled with poison, painful thoughts.
He shushed his mind, let his considerations drift in that rushing sound. He tried to think of the Sea – an inconvenient distraction since he first heard it long ago but a convenient preoccupation lately. But it was so perverse that it dodged him this time, stuck as he was in a place of stone.
He lowered his hands away and sighed, and looked resignedly up at the tomb and the king’s sculpture over it. From the lower place at which he sat so close, he could only see a few things; the tips of Aragorn’s boots, the top of the hilt of his sword, a sliver of the tip of his nose.
Legolas reached for the stone shakily, and rested his palms on the cold surface. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and found the courage to come closer.
He leaned his head against the stone, and remembered an altogether different time, when the cold was more comfort than cruel.
# # #
Minas Tirth
Third Age, 3019
The Return of the King
# # #
The halls of the royal residence were empty, but thrumming with the nimbus of borrowed life. Light streamed in from outside, through windows aglow from moon and stars, and lamps that lit the heady festivities below. The occasional fireworks added puffs of color and bursts of sound, and echoing about the halls were the muffled sounds of chatter, music and laughter from all the merriment going on outside.
There was every reason to celebrate.
Victory against all odds over such long-standing evil. The rise of unlikely heroes and the creation of new legends. The return of a king...
Aragorn had just wed an unparalleled bride and their marriage, the very object of that night’s spectacular celebrations. Alliances were formed. Promises were kept and new ones made, and what was truly a fresh new age, had just begun.
Legolas pondered on these things, loosely, as he made his (very slightly!) limping way back to the quarters he’d been staying in. Large as it was, the House of the King of Gondor was full to brimming, overtaken by the esteemed attendees of the wedding festivities. Legolas had the privilege of having lofty chambers at pride of place, owing both to his royal status as Prince of the Woodland Realm and representative of his father the Elvenking, as well as on his own merits, being a hero from the Fellowship and a close friend to both the bride and the groom.
He and Gimli took pity upon Aragorn’s harried protocol officers and volunteered to share chambers, thus freeing up one more room to meet the occasion’s demands. Mostly though, they both preferred it that way; Legolas’ lingering immobility demanded the indoor entertainments of the dwarf, while Gimli wanted to both keep an eye on his friend while giving him grief about having taken such grievous injury while he, Aule’s hardy creation that he was, all but emerged unscathed (a most misleading statement, Legolas would contend even if the dwarf pretended not to hear it, for Gimli was only comparatively unscathed!).
Gimli, however, was not by his side in his early retreat from the reception that followed the wedding ceremony. It was shaping up to be a party that would last to at least the breaking of the dawn, and Legolas had more pressing inclinations.
His bed, for one thing, though he would not readily admit it. In that last battle of the war, he’d taken a particularly vicious hit that nearly cost him his leg and later, nearly cost him his life as he battled the ravages of infection. Recovery when it came, came slowly and intricately woven around recurrent fevers and maddening pain.
In the end the whole misadventure of it all cost him weeks in bed, months of recuperation, and the inability to return to his woodland home to help with recovery efforts from the brutal fighting they suffered there while he was away with the Fellowship.
But at least he was in Gondor, and had been allowed brief excursions to witness the honoring of the hobbits, the crowning of Elessar, and just earlier today – the wedding of the new King to his beloved Evenstar.
Legolas turned a corner, and was suddenly surprised to find he was no longer alone. No less than the Lord of Imladris himself was sharing the otherwise empty corridor with him. Elrond was leaning upon the ledge of one of the long, wide, arced windows that lined the hall. From this vantage point, he was watching the festivities unfold upon the grounds below, and seemed not to notice Legolas at first.
The younger elf entertained the idea of flight, but he turned and twisted his body in the wrong way, and his healing leg folded beneath him until he was able to brace himself upon the wall. He hoped it was the rustling of his ornate formal robes that had caught the elf-lord’s attention, and not the quiet yelp he had managed to bite back before it created too much embarrassment.
Elrond’s head shot up and their eyes met, and it was too late to do anything else but move forward. Legolas took a deep breath, straightened his posture, and walked toward the esteemed healer with as much bluster as he could muster.
Elrond kept his place but was edged slightly forward – ready to rush forward and help at need, but preferring to watch Legolas’ movements instead and subject him to an expert healer’s eye.
Legolas grinned up at him when he stepped up to the elf-lord without further incident, self-satisfied by the achievement.
“You are not doing as well as you think, ernil,” Elrond said, “but you are doing well enough.”
“That is what my king often says of my archery,” Legolas joked.
The Lord of Imladris smiled wanly. His gaze drifted to the merriment unfolding beneath them. He looked wistful, and why wouldn’t he be? They were looking at victory and love but even for all these trappings, Elrond of Rivendell was still losing his beloved foster son and his daughter to mortality.
Legolas had just about decided to leave the elf-lord to his own quiet reflections when Elrond broke the silence first.
“Do you think this is how the gods watch the world?”
Legolas followed his abstract gaze. “I am only glad they still watch us at all, my lord. In my younger years, out in the woods – sometimes I did not think so.”
“You’ve always had to do things to help yourselves and not rely on anyone else,” Elrond said thoughtfully. “Why wouldn’t you see things that way? It was a difficult situation indeed that you faced in the Woodland, attacked for centuries even before the war began anew and in earnest. It must have been an extraordinary sacrifice for you to have gone with the Fellowship rather than offer your services at home. We are ever grateful. I am particularly so, for how you had stood by Estel.”
“I’d always hoped for an end to our protracted war,” Legolas said. “I was only too glad to work for the same end and have a reasonable plan in place. I am grateful to have had a small part to play in all of this.”
Elrond smiled more warmly then. “’Reasonable.’ Not quite the words your father used when he eventually understood where I’d sent his only son and wrote me to express his, ah, shall we say - eloquent disapproval?”
“It must have been a colorfully worded letter.”
“And how!”
They returned to watching the merriment below.
“It amazes me still,” Legolas murmured, “the things that fathers and mothers let their children go out in the world to do.”
They fell into another silence, as Elrond understood the younger elf was speaking not only of his relationship with his adar the Elvenking, but also of Elrond’s relationship to Aragorn and Arwen.
“Ah but parents are far more lax with their children than they are with their spouses,” Elrond said wistfully. “The time is drawing near, for example, with which I would have to account to my dear wife of what I had let happen here.”
The Lady Celebrian, Legolas remembered, had sailed long ago. She was not likely to be overjoyed that her only daughter had chosen mortality out of love for Aragorn.
“She will have eternity to forgive you at least,” Legolas managed, swallowing down an awkward, nervous chortle. He was not well-versed in handling wistful fathers or troublesome spouses, and even less knowledgeable of what to do if the sufferer were the usually more composed Lord Elrond of Rivendell.
“And the prize must ultimately be worth the pain,” Legolas added quickly. “For look below at that which you had ‘let happen,’ my lord. There is love here, and victory, and life and light.”
Elrond sighed. “And yet as I watch them, I know I am already looking at a memory.” He looked at Legolas thoughtfully. “You were a lone elf in the company of mortals for a lengthy period of time, in especially trying and meaningful circumstances, Legolas. You must have sometimes felt the same.”
Legolas considered it. “I did not have the luxury of thinking so before, my lord. It was all one thing after another after another. Trying to stay alive, trying to keep alert. I will now though, I think, now that you’ve brought it to notice.”
“Speaking of which - you’ve had much to do with the success of this venture,” Elrond said, “Why are you indulging this miserable old elf - the bride’s morose father - and not be amongst your fellows in victory below, enjoying the fruits of your work?”
Legolas shrugged. “I tire easily of late, my lord, I am not yet what I was. Mostly though – as long as I remain down there, a healer or Gimli would take it upon himself to watch over me, and so there is no celebration for them as long as they are in my company. I would rather not impose upon anyone, and can find my own celebrations here while resting.” He tilted his head at the other elf. “Why are you not there enjoying the fruits of your labors?”
Elrond gave him a wicked grin and repeated most of what Legolas had said back. “As long as I remain down there, someone would take it upon himself to watch over me, and so there is no celebration for them as long as they are in my company. I would rather not impose upon anyone, and can find my own celebrations here.”
Legolas had been chuckling quietly and waving away Elrond’s answer as he spoke it. “For being the bride’s morose father, hir-nin – you are not poor company.”
“For a limping wood-elf with a horrible sense of humor – neither are you.”
Legolas grinned. He leaned his hip against the ledge too, to remove weight from his injury and to have a better look at the festivities below. His elf eyes could see such distances that the details could be quite sharp.
There, Gimli and Eomer in their cups. What quick work the dwarf had done of his exit! Not far from them was the Lady Eowyn, making eyes at the valiant Faramir. Elsewhere, Aragorn snuck a kiss upon his wife’s knuckles. She laughed, an Evenstar shining all the brighter. And the White Wizard, for all of his power and dignity, discreetly plucked pipeweed from an inebriated, singing Merry and Pippin, as Frodo and Sam looked on with warm smiles.
Legolas leaned his head against the stone wall, felt its cool surface against his flushed forehead. He sighed in comfort at the sensation, and contentment at the sight before him.
# # #
Minas Tirith
Fourth Age, 120
The Death of the King
# # #
They were already a memory.
Lord Elrond had warned him, hadn’t he? The Lord of Imladris already had goodbye in his sights, but Legolas was too young perhaps, and victory still too fresh and heady, for him to truly comprehend what the older elf meant. He did not understand completely at the time, but even as he knew them, even as he spoke to them, even as he held them – his dearest friends were already a memory.
Legolas opened his eyes and returned to his present reality, but the vision of that festive night still danced before his eyes, like mist over the cold gray stones, a veil shadowing his current circumstances. He saw specters of light and merriment, heard the echoes of music, the voice and laughter of ghosts.
He hung onto the peace and happiness of that distant memory, but it rippled, shivering like a leaf at the end of autumn, stirred by the winds of the coming winter.
His distraction caught him unawares, for the doors to the Houses of the Dead opened, and suddenly he had no time to flee and limited places to hide.
He ducked behind Aragorn’s tomb, on the side facing away from the hallway that led to his resting place. Legolas held his knees to his chest and quieted his breaths, slowed the beating of his heart.
He listened and attempted to identify the new arrivals by their footfalls. Soft, sharp sounds of weapons and mail and heavy booted feet meant the presence of guards. They flanked the soft, padded feet and heavy, fine rustling robes of a woman who could not have been anyone else but Arwen Undomiel.
He grimaced, and pondered his options. He could hide until she left, but the gods knew how long she meant to stay, and who’s to say she wouldn’t walk around her husband’s tomb, as Legolas had in admiring its make? The more honorable thing to do was to reveal his presence, before anything happened that would embarrass them both. He wouldn’t know what to do if she started weeping.
“Thank you - you may go,” she ordered her guards, her lovely, melodious voice set low and grave, ragged, unused or perhaps, having been used in crying instead of talking.
Her soldiers did her bidding, and Legolas listened to them scurry away, before the doors closed and they stood guard in wait for her outside.
“Legolas Greenleaf!” she suddenly hissed, and Legolas’ grimace only deepened. “Come out from there! I may have acquired the destiny of a mortal but my senses do not deceive me and there is a forest elf hiding somewhere beneath all this forbidding stone.”
He shook his head at himself in dismay, but rose to his feet and looked at the grieving widow with a chagrined expression on his face. She was still garbed in mourning black, but had pulled back her dark veil, revealing a pallid face and drawn, dark-rimmed eyes. She looked ill, but then how else was she supposed to look, having just lost the love of her life and, if things went the way they were supposed to – was soon lose her own life as well?
Another friend to mourn, Legolas thought, and he recalled now what her father had once said to him – I am already looking at a memory.
“I’m sorry, Arwen,” he said, feeling inexplicably like an elfling. “I didn’t intend to...” his voice drifted off.
“Enter without due permission?” she filled in. “Break in? Sneak around? Tell no one of your whereabouts and worry everyone?”
His macabre sense of humor teased a tremulous smile at his lips, and he valiantly tried to restrain it. “On the contrary I very much intended to do most of those things. I meant – I did not intend to trouble you. I did not intend to intrude upon your grief. And incidentally – I did not know anyone worried but have thankfully broken nothing.”
Aragorn would have laughed, and the thought of him doing so was both stinging and comforting at the same time - like a bitter pill or a healing salve. Arwen apparently thought so as well, for she glanced fondly down at the stone likeness of her deceased husband before looking up at Legolas wryly.
“Make me laugh here and now, why don’t you?” she murmured with a smile, but she did not laugh, not really. She might never laugh again, until the end of all that she still had to suffer before her final rest and the death that would finally bring reunion with Aragorn.
The two elves stood across from each other, Aragorn’s tomb lying between them. They haven’t been alone together in a long time, Legolas realized – it had always been Arwen, Aragorn and him, or the three of them in the company of others. He couldn’t even remember when the last time was, but what he did know was that today was probably not the best occasion for it.
“I am sorry for intruding upon your grief,” Legolas said. “I will leave you in peace.” He walked around Aragorn’s tomb, but she reached out for his arm as he passed.
“No, mellon-nin, stay,” she said.
He found that he actually did not want to. He wanted to leave not only for her sake, but for his own. He had come here to be alone. He came here to mourn openly and in solitude. He did not want Arwen to see him on his knees, and she was the last person whose overwhelming sadness he did not want to have to witness so intimately.
But she was Aragorn’s beloved widow and his own fading friend, besides; he therefore would have done anything she asked at that moment.
“Only as long as you can bear me,” he said softly, with a small smile.
She returned it wanly, and he remembered first her “morose” father during her wedding reception night, and then herself on that same occasion. Aragorn had snuck a kiss upon her knuckles, and she all but glowed in the dark, a midnight sun, incandescent, she lit up the world.
It was only a memory...
They stood quietly together for an indeterminate time. From how close they were, Legolas could feel her shoulders trembling minutely as she wept, and he clenched his jaws and let his mind white out. He did not want to think about Aragorn, or memories, or anything at all, really. He did not want to think. Any thought now, with his dear friend’s widow weeping beside him, could break him.
“Breathe, Legolas,” she suddenly said.
And he took a deep, shaky inhale by reflex, not having previously noticed that he held himself so still as to have forgotten about that. He exhaled carefully, even as he castigated himself from needing her reminders, needing her care. She was the widow, wasn’t she, and therefore it was she who had the most right to mourn. He was just a friend with outsize grief, wasn’t he? He was the interloper here, he reminded himself.
Get yourself together, you damned fool.
“Oh, Legolas,” she said sadly, pityingly.
He stepped back from her and turned his face low, and away. The tears came then, warm, salty, unbidden, unstoppable, even as he blinked them away. They were the strange sort, the kind that just flowed from the eyes, and he marveled because there was no hitch in his chest or throat. The tears just fell in rivulets down his cheeks, and he swiped at them but more and more came.
“He was worried about you toward the end,” Arwen said, and this was his undoing.
Legolas covered his face with one hand, while the other reached, without real conscious thought, for the unyielding surface of Aragorn’s bitterly cold resting place. His hand reached for the stone hands, the ones folded around the stone sword. He gripped it hard as if it would yield, as if it could warm, as if it were alive.
He lowered himself to his knees, a Prince reduced to supplicant, begging for release from grief for Aragorn that is too deep and too near and will always be so, for all the rest of his immortal life.
There have been goodbyes before this, and there will be just a few others left to follow it – Arwen, who would fade. And then Gimli, who would die.
Legolas laughed bitterly at himself, and it was this awful sound he thought, that drove Arwen to kneel beside him and lean close.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out, “This is unseemly and undeserved. I impose upon you too much. I should comfort, rather than covet it. I will leave-”
She put a gentle hand over his head and kept it there, which kept him there too. Her light was waning, but her warmth radiated from her palm through his hair and to his head.
“Estel was never mine alone, Legolas,” she told him softly. “That was his greatness, and it touches my heart to know how much he will always be loved. And it touches my heart further that his memory will be carried to the land of the Undying. For both our sakes, my friend – let yourself mourn your brother.”
And with the widow’s permission, he did. He closed his eyes and lowered his cry-flushed-forehead to the now-comforting cold of the forbidding stone. He wept, silently, but copiously.
She sat beside him, but instead of leaning forward against the tomb as he did, rested her back upon its side, as if it was just the back of a well-worn chair that she was used to leaning against. She waited quietly and easily as he released a torrent of previously dammed tears, her posture soft, her breathing even. When his tears ran dry, he settled down in the same position at her side. And like her, he leaned back against the tomb too.
Before Aragorn was king, they had too many days and nights like this. They had each other’s backs. They protected each other’s flank. They kept each other upright. A tomb is such poor substitute.
The thought sends a stray, remnant tear down his cheek, and he swipes at it as he would an irritating fly. He would be plagued by such irritants from here on out, he predicted. These little things that flit over the mind and sting and bite a little in their aftermath. A thousand cuts that cannot kill.
“As his days drew near and he sorted his affairs,” Arwen shared, “do you know that he was mourning you too? It was perhaps one of just a handful of things beyond his control. He was worried for you, as I previously said. I did not understand it right away, for it takes a certain perspective, doesn’t it? He was the one dying, but you were dying to him also.”
“I’d wondered about that,” admitted Legolas. “He would look at me sometimes like I’d caught some dreaded disease, as if I was on my last legs. Every death that diminished our circle of friends, he would look at me as if wondering if this is the one, the death that would finally drive me away over sea.”
“He understood the pain of it for you,” agreed Arwen, “but what I mean to say is that it pained him too, the loss of you. He knew the permanent parting that his death meant. I was to join him soon enough, and my twin brothers would somehow always have each other. But he was mourning the loss of you, and he imagined you alone in the end. It bothered him to restlessness.” She finished with a gentle tease, “A lesser wife would have been jealous.”
“I am assuming he found some peace with it,” the elven Prince said thoughtfully after a moment, “for he finally did close his eyes and left me to my miseries.”
“We all know the gods prophesy a truer End,” Arwen said, “and not any of this sundering... the gift of Men, the Halls of Mandos, the Undying Lands... none of these are a true heaven until they are populated by those we love, aren’t they? Estel was ensconced in the libraries a lot in the final days of his life, reading up on tales of the great battles that will still have to be fought against unimaginable evil. Anyone would be wise not to wish for such things as the Dagor Dagorath of course, but when it does come – it will be won by the light, too. And with winning comes a new song, a new world, a new haven... one with old friends. That is what he found, I think. It was the hope that finally let him sink into restful sleep.”
Legolas considered it.
“We’ve trusted them this far and the gods have not led us astray,” he murmured, alternately pestered and comforted again by another memory of Aragorn.
They were in Helm’s Deep, and masses of the enemy were headed their way not for war with Rohan, but for it’s annihilation. All they had in defense were farmers, farriers, stable boys.
The pragmatic wood-elf, who was born and raised a soldier from a long-besieged land, had a deep, unparalleled understanding of the odds. And in a rare display of unrestrained emotion and dissent from Aragorn, he decreed – “They are all going to die.”
As if he, Aragorn and Gimli were exempt.
“Then I shall die as one of them!” Aragorn retorted, a reminder brutal in its unerring truth.
They were not exempt from loss then, nor were they now. And Aragorn did die ‘as one of them,’ much later and as an exceptional mortal of course, but a mortal just the same.
Still –
“Maybe it is wrong to despair,” Legolas concluded.
It was wrong to despair then, after all. Maybe it was still wrong to despair now. Parting is just one more mountain to climb, one more river to cross, one more quest to complete. The End will come and with it, A Beginning. He’d trusted the gods – and his friends - this far, and he cannot waver in that faith.
“You will see each other again,” Arwen determined.
“But I sure will miss him until then,” Legolas said softly.
He did not mean it in the sense that he will miss Aragorn in some ambiguous future. He has been missing him, was still missing him now, even as he spoke. What he meant was that he suspected he always would.
She smiled wistfully. “As your friend I must warn you of something, since it us just the two of us here. In his final days, Aragorn found solace not only in his old books but in the company of Gimli.”
“The dwarf was here before me, yes,” said Legolas.
“I think they have hatched a scheme concerning you,” Arwen revealed. “They unearthed and were excitedly hovering over old shipbuilding plans. I snooped because I feared they had some intention of sending me away to Valinor in the last moment, but I realized quickly that such a harebrained kidnapping scheme would have likely included you. Your express exclusion, therefore, indicates you are the likely subject.”
Legolas met the revelation with both an unguarded laugh and another stray tear. Would all good memories be stained that way now, from this point forward?
“Ah, they’ve been trying to get rid of me for years, as you know,” Legolas said. “Early on when I struggled heavily with the sea-longing and again later, when one by one our friends passed away and they determined it was growing torture for me to be the last.”
“It is torture,” she said pointedly.
He shrugged. “When Gimli passes, I will sail and only then. I will have as much of his company as the length of his life allows, not a moment less. And then I will leave, and maybe the shores of our kin’s promises will hold some comfort from all the weight of it. But as long as Elvellon is of this Earth, then it too has claim upon me.”
“He will want some assurance of your well-being, that you are settled, before he makes his final sleep,” said Arwen, with an unreadable expression in her eyes.
“Then he would have to live forever,” Legolas said.
“Or something close to it,” Arwen murmured, thoughtfully.
Legolas raised an eyebrow at her and wondered at what she meant, and if he, Gimli and Aragorn had a monopoly on harebrained schemes. But she ignored him and did not elaborate, and he had no plans of grilling a widow when she had no inclination to reply.
“At least they stopped trying to find me a suitably immortal wife,” Legolas remembered with a chuckle, “for that had been a plan the two of them – in singularly embarrassing conspiracy with adar I might add - clumsily attempted for decades.”
“There remained too few of our kin in these shores,” Arwen reflected, “and your heroic reputation only became more daunting over time. Why do you think someone like the Lord Glorfindel never settled down with anybody?”
“Ah but Glorfindel is a saint and thankfully, I am not,” Legolas said with grin. “Maybe there will be someone for me in the end, but she will not be here. And maybe it is a mercy of its own sort, that Aragorn and Gimlil will have nothing whatsoever to do with my love life.” He tried it as a joke, but he ended up hurting himself.
His friends would never meet her...
Legolas’ eyes watered again, for his griefs were so intertwined with his joys, nowadays – memories and the gains and losses from them inextricable.
“Maybe we will meet, when we all see each other again,” Arwen murmured.
He looked at her lovely face, and memorized all the beautiful planes and shadows of it.
“Are you afraid?” he asked, for her death was nearing too. “What lies beyond is unknown to us.”
“I fear nothing now,” she said, meeting his gaze with a steely stare. “The loss of Estel was my last fear.”
He bit his lip and nodded. “The death of Gimli is mine,” he admitted. “I don’t know if I will survive it.”
“You will,” she promised. “He will make sure of it.”
Summary: Past and present collide, as Legolas visits the tomb of Aragorn, and ponders all that he has lost and gained in his friendship with mortal beings
Rating: T
Characters: Legolas, Elrond, Arwen
Warnings: Canon Character Death
Minas Tirith
Fourth Age, 120
The Death of the King
# # #
Just because one does not age, Legolas conceded to himself, it does not necessarily mean that one remains perpetually adept at a certain thing forever.
Sneaking around, for one, was something he suddenly realized he was no longer accustomed to.
Thousands of years, he berated himself, thousands of years he had honed unparalleled skills of stealth in his father’s once-dangerous forests, skills he brought to bear in service to the Fellowship of the Ring and the War that ended their struggles, and then devoted to cleaning up after the evil remnants that still sometimes marred their world. It was a wealth of experience, yielding a mind and body that was made for winning a war.
But I am out of practice, it seems...?
For the thousands of years were swiftly – all too swiftly – eroded by the last, scant few years of the blissful peace he and his friends have worked so hard to achieve.
I have rendered myself irrelevant.
He, a lifelong soldier, had helped craft a world without a need for one of this caliber anymore, thank the gods. Sometimes though, stealth still came in handy and this was one such instance.
This evening, he mourned the loss of that once-effortless, easy sneakiness, very, very much (aside other things he mourned – he killed the thought).
He used to do this unthinkingly, he thought with distaste. Now he had to take more care...
For it was difficult indeed to break into Elessar’s final resting place undetected.
The first obstacle was the Fen Hollen, that forbidding, almost always closed door on the sixth level of the city. It was well-fortified, well-guarded, and access was permitted to a scant few. This little list included Evenstar the dead King’s widow of course, their daughters, and undoubtedly their son, the new ruler.
Legolas was aware he could wrangle one such permission for himself easily, but – aside from what’s the fun in that? - he did not want to bother the family in their period of mourning, nor did he want any spectacle for this visit.
I just want to say goodb-
The second obstacle, beyond the door was the Rath Dinen, that miserable, narrow, deathly silent street that led to the Houses of Gondor’s stone-cold, dead nobility. It was a dead road leading to a dead hall of cold stone filled with the tombs of dead people. Dead, dead, dead, dead things shrouding dead people.
He reached Elessar’s tomb with no incident, and he reveled in the minor victory of it. He snickered to himself. Out of practice or not, the only thing that mattered was the outcome, and though he needed more effort now than he had in his youth, he still successfully achieved what he had set out to do.
That is, to be alone with his friend.
He walked around the stone slab, contemplating that it was a final resting place befitting a great king. The workmanship was exquisite and why wouldn’t it be; they had at their disposal, the finest smiths of the Kingdom, not to mention the considerable talents of a dwarf who was one of the greatest craftsmen to ever walk their lands.
He shook the thought of Gimli Son of Gloin away, that strange, lovely being who had somehow become indispensable to him, and yet was slated to be the next one he will mourn-
Beautiful lines, he thought appreciatively, of the arches carved into the stone slab, Intricate work. Masterful, especially how they blended into the branches of a strong, stout white tree.
He let his eyes drift up from the stone slab, and imagined his gaze snaking up the columns, arches and branches that adorned the sides of his tomb as they wound their way up to the high relief sculpture on the surface. It was a king at rest - draped in finery, crowned and armed with vambraces and a sword but with eyes closed, posture fixed in final, peaceful, eternal repose.
It’s a decent likeness, Legolas conceded.
A more just representation would have given Elessar’s face minute lines and scars though, he thought critically. Something that would say more of his character and experiences. Maybe a few stray strands of hair, nothing that would take from his dignity, for his hair was always in some measure of disarray (even when he became a King) and they never dented him anyway.
It is an awful likeness, Legolas suddenly decided. Cold and unfamiliar, something Aragorn never was.
“Aragorn,” he whispered brokenly into the quiet of the hallowed halls, and suddenly the man was flesh and blood in his mind, a drastically different being from the immovable stone before him.
This is a stranger, and the man I know is gone forever.
He gasped for the ache of the loss of it, and how the stone was such a poor, pathetic substitute, even for all of that it was a masterpiece-
A masterpiece.
The draping work on the fabric is particularly exquisite, he thought as he took a deep, shaky breath and steeled himself. This is difficult work, the folds seemingly silken, following the laws of the physical world so accurately that they really did look as if they followed the shape of the body beneath.
The body-
He felt sick to his stomach.
He folded forward, hugging himself about the middle, all the while thinking it would be one of the worst things ever, ever, if he should be ill all over the tomb of the greatest of the kings of men.
Would they arrest me for that? he wondered inanely, for these Gondorians could be such sticklers for protocol.
His throat worked hard and he swallowed repeatedly around a lump lodged there, which easily could have been either today’s lunch, or unshed tears, or unsaid words.
He fell to his knees, and reached out by instinct toward the rock slab, so that he would fall no further. But it was freezing cold in his palms, and the thought of this, of Aragorn beneath this frigid thing and his warmth and light smothered, made Legolas’ stomach clench all the harder.
He recoiled away and ended up on his rump, curled slightly on the ground at the foot of his good friend’s well-constructed tomb.
A masterful work, he decreed, over and over in his head. Exquisite. Everlasting.
Stone to last the ages, long beyond life. Long beyond people who will mourn or perhaps even longer than people who will remember-
He placed a hand over his ears, and in muffling his hearing, he created the sound of rushing air to cover the silence that his tormented mind filled with poison, painful thoughts.
He shushed his mind, let his considerations drift in that rushing sound. He tried to think of the Sea – an inconvenient distraction since he first heard it long ago but a convenient preoccupation lately. But it was so perverse that it dodged him this time, stuck as he was in a place of stone.
He lowered his hands away and sighed, and looked resignedly up at the tomb and the king’s sculpture over it. From the lower place at which he sat so close, he could only see a few things; the tips of Aragorn’s boots, the top of the hilt of his sword, a sliver of the tip of his nose.
Legolas reached for the stone shakily, and rested his palms on the cold surface. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and found the courage to come closer.
He leaned his head against the stone, and remembered an altogether different time, when the cold was more comfort than cruel.
# # #
Minas Tirth
Third Age, 3019
The Return of the King
# # #
The halls of the royal residence were empty, but thrumming with the nimbus of borrowed life. Light streamed in from outside, through windows aglow from moon and stars, and lamps that lit the heady festivities below. The occasional fireworks added puffs of color and bursts of sound, and echoing about the halls were the muffled sounds of chatter, music and laughter from all the merriment going on outside.
There was every reason to celebrate.
Victory against all odds over such long-standing evil. The rise of unlikely heroes and the creation of new legends. The return of a king...
Aragorn had just wed an unparalleled bride and their marriage, the very object of that night’s spectacular celebrations. Alliances were formed. Promises were kept and new ones made, and what was truly a fresh new age, had just begun.
Legolas pondered on these things, loosely, as he made his (very slightly!) limping way back to the quarters he’d been staying in. Large as it was, the House of the King of Gondor was full to brimming, overtaken by the esteemed attendees of the wedding festivities. Legolas had the privilege of having lofty chambers at pride of place, owing both to his royal status as Prince of the Woodland Realm and representative of his father the Elvenking, as well as on his own merits, being a hero from the Fellowship and a close friend to both the bride and the groom.
He and Gimli took pity upon Aragorn’s harried protocol officers and volunteered to share chambers, thus freeing up one more room to meet the occasion’s demands. Mostly though, they both preferred it that way; Legolas’ lingering immobility demanded the indoor entertainments of the dwarf, while Gimli wanted to both keep an eye on his friend while giving him grief about having taken such grievous injury while he, Aule’s hardy creation that he was, all but emerged unscathed (a most misleading statement, Legolas would contend even if the dwarf pretended not to hear it, for Gimli was only comparatively unscathed!).
Gimli, however, was not by his side in his early retreat from the reception that followed the wedding ceremony. It was shaping up to be a party that would last to at least the breaking of the dawn, and Legolas had more pressing inclinations.
His bed, for one thing, though he would not readily admit it. In that last battle of the war, he’d taken a particularly vicious hit that nearly cost him his leg and later, nearly cost him his life as he battled the ravages of infection. Recovery when it came, came slowly and intricately woven around recurrent fevers and maddening pain.
In the end the whole misadventure of it all cost him weeks in bed, months of recuperation, and the inability to return to his woodland home to help with recovery efforts from the brutal fighting they suffered there while he was away with the Fellowship.
But at least he was in Gondor, and had been allowed brief excursions to witness the honoring of the hobbits, the crowning of Elessar, and just earlier today – the wedding of the new King to his beloved Evenstar.
Legolas turned a corner, and was suddenly surprised to find he was no longer alone. No less than the Lord of Imladris himself was sharing the otherwise empty corridor with him. Elrond was leaning upon the ledge of one of the long, wide, arced windows that lined the hall. From this vantage point, he was watching the festivities unfold upon the grounds below, and seemed not to notice Legolas at first.
The younger elf entertained the idea of flight, but he turned and twisted his body in the wrong way, and his healing leg folded beneath him until he was able to brace himself upon the wall. He hoped it was the rustling of his ornate formal robes that had caught the elf-lord’s attention, and not the quiet yelp he had managed to bite back before it created too much embarrassment.
Elrond’s head shot up and their eyes met, and it was too late to do anything else but move forward. Legolas took a deep breath, straightened his posture, and walked toward the esteemed healer with as much bluster as he could muster.
Elrond kept his place but was edged slightly forward – ready to rush forward and help at need, but preferring to watch Legolas’ movements instead and subject him to an expert healer’s eye.
Legolas grinned up at him when he stepped up to the elf-lord without further incident, self-satisfied by the achievement.
“You are not doing as well as you think, ernil,” Elrond said, “but you are doing well enough.”
“That is what my king often says of my archery,” Legolas joked.
The Lord of Imladris smiled wanly. His gaze drifted to the merriment unfolding beneath them. He looked wistful, and why wouldn’t he be? They were looking at victory and love but even for all these trappings, Elrond of Rivendell was still losing his beloved foster son and his daughter to mortality.
Legolas had just about decided to leave the elf-lord to his own quiet reflections when Elrond broke the silence first.
“Do you think this is how the gods watch the world?”
Legolas followed his abstract gaze. “I am only glad they still watch us at all, my lord. In my younger years, out in the woods – sometimes I did not think so.”
“You’ve always had to do things to help yourselves and not rely on anyone else,” Elrond said thoughtfully. “Why wouldn’t you see things that way? It was a difficult situation indeed that you faced in the Woodland, attacked for centuries even before the war began anew and in earnest. It must have been an extraordinary sacrifice for you to have gone with the Fellowship rather than offer your services at home. We are ever grateful. I am particularly so, for how you had stood by Estel.”
“I’d always hoped for an end to our protracted war,” Legolas said. “I was only too glad to work for the same end and have a reasonable plan in place. I am grateful to have had a small part to play in all of this.”
Elrond smiled more warmly then. “’Reasonable.’ Not quite the words your father used when he eventually understood where I’d sent his only son and wrote me to express his, ah, shall we say - eloquent disapproval?”
“It must have been a colorfully worded letter.”
“And how!”
They returned to watching the merriment below.
“It amazes me still,” Legolas murmured, “the things that fathers and mothers let their children go out in the world to do.”
They fell into another silence, as Elrond understood the younger elf was speaking not only of his relationship with his adar the Elvenking, but also of Elrond’s relationship to Aragorn and Arwen.
“Ah but parents are far more lax with their children than they are with their spouses,” Elrond said wistfully. “The time is drawing near, for example, with which I would have to account to my dear wife of what I had let happen here.”
The Lady Celebrian, Legolas remembered, had sailed long ago. She was not likely to be overjoyed that her only daughter had chosen mortality out of love for Aragorn.
“She will have eternity to forgive you at least,” Legolas managed, swallowing down an awkward, nervous chortle. He was not well-versed in handling wistful fathers or troublesome spouses, and even less knowledgeable of what to do if the sufferer were the usually more composed Lord Elrond of Rivendell.
“And the prize must ultimately be worth the pain,” Legolas added quickly. “For look below at that which you had ‘let happen,’ my lord. There is love here, and victory, and life and light.”
Elrond sighed. “And yet as I watch them, I know I am already looking at a memory.” He looked at Legolas thoughtfully. “You were a lone elf in the company of mortals for a lengthy period of time, in especially trying and meaningful circumstances, Legolas. You must have sometimes felt the same.”
Legolas considered it. “I did not have the luxury of thinking so before, my lord. It was all one thing after another after another. Trying to stay alive, trying to keep alert. I will now though, I think, now that you’ve brought it to notice.”
“Speaking of which - you’ve had much to do with the success of this venture,” Elrond said, “Why are you indulging this miserable old elf - the bride’s morose father - and not be amongst your fellows in victory below, enjoying the fruits of your work?”
Legolas shrugged. “I tire easily of late, my lord, I am not yet what I was. Mostly though – as long as I remain down there, a healer or Gimli would take it upon himself to watch over me, and so there is no celebration for them as long as they are in my company. I would rather not impose upon anyone, and can find my own celebrations here while resting.” He tilted his head at the other elf. “Why are you not there enjoying the fruits of your labors?”
Elrond gave him a wicked grin and repeated most of what Legolas had said back. “As long as I remain down there, someone would take it upon himself to watch over me, and so there is no celebration for them as long as they are in my company. I would rather not impose upon anyone, and can find my own celebrations here.”
Legolas had been chuckling quietly and waving away Elrond’s answer as he spoke it. “For being the bride’s morose father, hir-nin – you are not poor company.”
“For a limping wood-elf with a horrible sense of humor – neither are you.”
Legolas grinned. He leaned his hip against the ledge too, to remove weight from his injury and to have a better look at the festivities below. His elf eyes could see such distances that the details could be quite sharp.
There, Gimli and Eomer in their cups. What quick work the dwarf had done of his exit! Not far from them was the Lady Eowyn, making eyes at the valiant Faramir. Elsewhere, Aragorn snuck a kiss upon his wife’s knuckles. She laughed, an Evenstar shining all the brighter. And the White Wizard, for all of his power and dignity, discreetly plucked pipeweed from an inebriated, singing Merry and Pippin, as Frodo and Sam looked on with warm smiles.
Legolas leaned his head against the stone wall, felt its cool surface against his flushed forehead. He sighed in comfort at the sensation, and contentment at the sight before him.
# # #
Minas Tirith
Fourth Age, 120
The Death of the King
# # #
They were already a memory.
Lord Elrond had warned him, hadn’t he? The Lord of Imladris already had goodbye in his sights, but Legolas was too young perhaps, and victory still too fresh and heady, for him to truly comprehend what the older elf meant. He did not understand completely at the time, but even as he knew them, even as he spoke to them, even as he held them – his dearest friends were already a memory.
Legolas opened his eyes and returned to his present reality, but the vision of that festive night still danced before his eyes, like mist over the cold gray stones, a veil shadowing his current circumstances. He saw specters of light and merriment, heard the echoes of music, the voice and laughter of ghosts.
He hung onto the peace and happiness of that distant memory, but it rippled, shivering like a leaf at the end of autumn, stirred by the winds of the coming winter.
His distraction caught him unawares, for the doors to the Houses of the Dead opened, and suddenly he had no time to flee and limited places to hide.
He ducked behind Aragorn’s tomb, on the side facing away from the hallway that led to his resting place. Legolas held his knees to his chest and quieted his breaths, slowed the beating of his heart.
He listened and attempted to identify the new arrivals by their footfalls. Soft, sharp sounds of weapons and mail and heavy booted feet meant the presence of guards. They flanked the soft, padded feet and heavy, fine rustling robes of a woman who could not have been anyone else but Arwen Undomiel.
He grimaced, and pondered his options. He could hide until she left, but the gods knew how long she meant to stay, and who’s to say she wouldn’t walk around her husband’s tomb, as Legolas had in admiring its make? The more honorable thing to do was to reveal his presence, before anything happened that would embarrass them both. He wouldn’t know what to do if she started weeping.
“Thank you - you may go,” she ordered her guards, her lovely, melodious voice set low and grave, ragged, unused or perhaps, having been used in crying instead of talking.
Her soldiers did her bidding, and Legolas listened to them scurry away, before the doors closed and they stood guard in wait for her outside.
“Legolas Greenleaf!” she suddenly hissed, and Legolas’ grimace only deepened. “Come out from there! I may have acquired the destiny of a mortal but my senses do not deceive me and there is a forest elf hiding somewhere beneath all this forbidding stone.”
He shook his head at himself in dismay, but rose to his feet and looked at the grieving widow with a chagrined expression on his face. She was still garbed in mourning black, but had pulled back her dark veil, revealing a pallid face and drawn, dark-rimmed eyes. She looked ill, but then how else was she supposed to look, having just lost the love of her life and, if things went the way they were supposed to – was soon lose her own life as well?
Another friend to mourn, Legolas thought, and he recalled now what her father had once said to him – I am already looking at a memory.
“I’m sorry, Arwen,” he said, feeling inexplicably like an elfling. “I didn’t intend to...” his voice drifted off.
“Enter without due permission?” she filled in. “Break in? Sneak around? Tell no one of your whereabouts and worry everyone?”
His macabre sense of humor teased a tremulous smile at his lips, and he valiantly tried to restrain it. “On the contrary I very much intended to do most of those things. I meant – I did not intend to trouble you. I did not intend to intrude upon your grief. And incidentally – I did not know anyone worried but have thankfully broken nothing.”
Aragorn would have laughed, and the thought of him doing so was both stinging and comforting at the same time - like a bitter pill or a healing salve. Arwen apparently thought so as well, for she glanced fondly down at the stone likeness of her deceased husband before looking up at Legolas wryly.
“Make me laugh here and now, why don’t you?” she murmured with a smile, but she did not laugh, not really. She might never laugh again, until the end of all that she still had to suffer before her final rest and the death that would finally bring reunion with Aragorn.
The two elves stood across from each other, Aragorn’s tomb lying between them. They haven’t been alone together in a long time, Legolas realized – it had always been Arwen, Aragorn and him, or the three of them in the company of others. He couldn’t even remember when the last time was, but what he did know was that today was probably not the best occasion for it.
“I am sorry for intruding upon your grief,” Legolas said. “I will leave you in peace.” He walked around Aragorn’s tomb, but she reached out for his arm as he passed.
“No, mellon-nin, stay,” she said.
He found that he actually did not want to. He wanted to leave not only for her sake, but for his own. He had come here to be alone. He came here to mourn openly and in solitude. He did not want Arwen to see him on his knees, and she was the last person whose overwhelming sadness he did not want to have to witness so intimately.
But she was Aragorn’s beloved widow and his own fading friend, besides; he therefore would have done anything she asked at that moment.
“Only as long as you can bear me,” he said softly, with a small smile.
She returned it wanly, and he remembered first her “morose” father during her wedding reception night, and then herself on that same occasion. Aragorn had snuck a kiss upon her knuckles, and she all but glowed in the dark, a midnight sun, incandescent, she lit up the world.
It was only a memory...
They stood quietly together for an indeterminate time. From how close they were, Legolas could feel her shoulders trembling minutely as she wept, and he clenched his jaws and let his mind white out. He did not want to think about Aragorn, or memories, or anything at all, really. He did not want to think. Any thought now, with his dear friend’s widow weeping beside him, could break him.
“Breathe, Legolas,” she suddenly said.
And he took a deep, shaky inhale by reflex, not having previously noticed that he held himself so still as to have forgotten about that. He exhaled carefully, even as he castigated himself from needing her reminders, needing her care. She was the widow, wasn’t she, and therefore it was she who had the most right to mourn. He was just a friend with outsize grief, wasn’t he? He was the interloper here, he reminded himself.
Get yourself together, you damned fool.
“Oh, Legolas,” she said sadly, pityingly.
He stepped back from her and turned his face low, and away. The tears came then, warm, salty, unbidden, unstoppable, even as he blinked them away. They were the strange sort, the kind that just flowed from the eyes, and he marveled because there was no hitch in his chest or throat. The tears just fell in rivulets down his cheeks, and he swiped at them but more and more came.
“He was worried about you toward the end,” Arwen said, and this was his undoing.
Legolas covered his face with one hand, while the other reached, without real conscious thought, for the unyielding surface of Aragorn’s bitterly cold resting place. His hand reached for the stone hands, the ones folded around the stone sword. He gripped it hard as if it would yield, as if it could warm, as if it were alive.
He lowered himself to his knees, a Prince reduced to supplicant, begging for release from grief for Aragorn that is too deep and too near and will always be so, for all the rest of his immortal life.
There have been goodbyes before this, and there will be just a few others left to follow it – Arwen, who would fade. And then Gimli, who would die.
Legolas laughed bitterly at himself, and it was this awful sound he thought, that drove Arwen to kneel beside him and lean close.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out, “This is unseemly and undeserved. I impose upon you too much. I should comfort, rather than covet it. I will leave-”
She put a gentle hand over his head and kept it there, which kept him there too. Her light was waning, but her warmth radiated from her palm through his hair and to his head.
“Estel was never mine alone, Legolas,” she told him softly. “That was his greatness, and it touches my heart to know how much he will always be loved. And it touches my heart further that his memory will be carried to the land of the Undying. For both our sakes, my friend – let yourself mourn your brother.”
And with the widow’s permission, he did. He closed his eyes and lowered his cry-flushed-forehead to the now-comforting cold of the forbidding stone. He wept, silently, but copiously.
She sat beside him, but instead of leaning forward against the tomb as he did, rested her back upon its side, as if it was just the back of a well-worn chair that she was used to leaning against. She waited quietly and easily as he released a torrent of previously dammed tears, her posture soft, her breathing even. When his tears ran dry, he settled down in the same position at her side. And like her, he leaned back against the tomb too.
Before Aragorn was king, they had too many days and nights like this. They had each other’s backs. They protected each other’s flank. They kept each other upright. A tomb is such poor substitute.
The thought sends a stray, remnant tear down his cheek, and he swipes at it as he would an irritating fly. He would be plagued by such irritants from here on out, he predicted. These little things that flit over the mind and sting and bite a little in their aftermath. A thousand cuts that cannot kill.
“As his days drew near and he sorted his affairs,” Arwen shared, “do you know that he was mourning you too? It was perhaps one of just a handful of things beyond his control. He was worried for you, as I previously said. I did not understand it right away, for it takes a certain perspective, doesn’t it? He was the one dying, but you were dying to him also.”
“I’d wondered about that,” admitted Legolas. “He would look at me sometimes like I’d caught some dreaded disease, as if I was on my last legs. Every death that diminished our circle of friends, he would look at me as if wondering if this is the one, the death that would finally drive me away over sea.”
“He understood the pain of it for you,” agreed Arwen, “but what I mean to say is that it pained him too, the loss of you. He knew the permanent parting that his death meant. I was to join him soon enough, and my twin brothers would somehow always have each other. But he was mourning the loss of you, and he imagined you alone in the end. It bothered him to restlessness.” She finished with a gentle tease, “A lesser wife would have been jealous.”
“I am assuming he found some peace with it,” the elven Prince said thoughtfully after a moment, “for he finally did close his eyes and left me to my miseries.”
“We all know the gods prophesy a truer End,” Arwen said, “and not any of this sundering... the gift of Men, the Halls of Mandos, the Undying Lands... none of these are a true heaven until they are populated by those we love, aren’t they? Estel was ensconced in the libraries a lot in the final days of his life, reading up on tales of the great battles that will still have to be fought against unimaginable evil. Anyone would be wise not to wish for such things as the Dagor Dagorath of course, but when it does come – it will be won by the light, too. And with winning comes a new song, a new world, a new haven... one with old friends. That is what he found, I think. It was the hope that finally let him sink into restful sleep.”
Legolas considered it.
“We’ve trusted them this far and the gods have not led us astray,” he murmured, alternately pestered and comforted again by another memory of Aragorn.
They were in Helm’s Deep, and masses of the enemy were headed their way not for war with Rohan, but for it’s annihilation. All they had in defense were farmers, farriers, stable boys.
The pragmatic wood-elf, who was born and raised a soldier from a long-besieged land, had a deep, unparalleled understanding of the odds. And in a rare display of unrestrained emotion and dissent from Aragorn, he decreed – “They are all going to die.”
As if he, Aragorn and Gimli were exempt.
“Then I shall die as one of them!” Aragorn retorted, a reminder brutal in its unerring truth.
They were not exempt from loss then, nor were they now. And Aragorn did die ‘as one of them,’ much later and as an exceptional mortal of course, but a mortal just the same.
Still –
“Maybe it is wrong to despair,” Legolas concluded.
It was wrong to despair then, after all. Maybe it was still wrong to despair now. Parting is just one more mountain to climb, one more river to cross, one more quest to complete. The End will come and with it, A Beginning. He’d trusted the gods – and his friends - this far, and he cannot waver in that faith.
“You will see each other again,” Arwen determined.
“But I sure will miss him until then,” Legolas said softly.
He did not mean it in the sense that he will miss Aragorn in some ambiguous future. He has been missing him, was still missing him now, even as he spoke. What he meant was that he suspected he always would.
She smiled wistfully. “As your friend I must warn you of something, since it us just the two of us here. In his final days, Aragorn found solace not only in his old books but in the company of Gimli.”
“The dwarf was here before me, yes,” said Legolas.
“I think they have hatched a scheme concerning you,” Arwen revealed. “They unearthed and were excitedly hovering over old shipbuilding plans. I snooped because I feared they had some intention of sending me away to Valinor in the last moment, but I realized quickly that such a harebrained kidnapping scheme would have likely included you. Your express exclusion, therefore, indicates you are the likely subject.”
Legolas met the revelation with both an unguarded laugh and another stray tear. Would all good memories be stained that way now, from this point forward?
“Ah, they’ve been trying to get rid of me for years, as you know,” Legolas said. “Early on when I struggled heavily with the sea-longing and again later, when one by one our friends passed away and they determined it was growing torture for me to be the last.”
“It is torture,” she said pointedly.
He shrugged. “When Gimli passes, I will sail and only then. I will have as much of his company as the length of his life allows, not a moment less. And then I will leave, and maybe the shores of our kin’s promises will hold some comfort from all the weight of it. But as long as Elvellon is of this Earth, then it too has claim upon me.”
“He will want some assurance of your well-being, that you are settled, before he makes his final sleep,” said Arwen, with an unreadable expression in her eyes.
“Then he would have to live forever,” Legolas said.
“Or something close to it,” Arwen murmured, thoughtfully.
Legolas raised an eyebrow at her and wondered at what she meant, and if he, Gimli and Aragorn had a monopoly on harebrained schemes. But she ignored him and did not elaborate, and he had no plans of grilling a widow when she had no inclination to reply.
“At least they stopped trying to find me a suitably immortal wife,” Legolas remembered with a chuckle, “for that had been a plan the two of them – in singularly embarrassing conspiracy with adar I might add - clumsily attempted for decades.”
“There remained too few of our kin in these shores,” Arwen reflected, “and your heroic reputation only became more daunting over time. Why do you think someone like the Lord Glorfindel never settled down with anybody?”
“Ah but Glorfindel is a saint and thankfully, I am not,” Legolas said with grin. “Maybe there will be someone for me in the end, but she will not be here. And maybe it is a mercy of its own sort, that Aragorn and Gimlil will have nothing whatsoever to do with my love life.” He tried it as a joke, but he ended up hurting himself.
His friends would never meet her...
Legolas’ eyes watered again, for his griefs were so intertwined with his joys, nowadays – memories and the gains and losses from them inextricable.
“Maybe we will meet, when we all see each other again,” Arwen murmured.
He looked at her lovely face, and memorized all the beautiful planes and shadows of it.
“Are you afraid?” he asked, for her death was nearing too. “What lies beyond is unknown to us.”
“I fear nothing now,” she said, meeting his gaze with a steely stare. “The loss of Estel was my last fear.”
He bit his lip and nodded. “The death of Gimli is mine,” he admitted. “I don’t know if I will survive it.”
“You will,” she promised. “He will make sure of it.”