The elf’s sobs slowed, but tears still shined on her cheeks as she turned to face him at last. Legolas could not imagine what could cause her such grief. She looked at him as if…Legolas did not have the words to describe it. As if she had lost something, something precious, beyond description - it reminded him, somehow, of the way his father looked sometimes, late at night when he was lost in memory. Legolas had felt loss, but never that potent; his loss was abstract, for a home whose greatness he had never seen, for a mother he’d barely known. Such pain as was in her eyes was beyond him still.
My little one she called him, and Legolas caught his breath, not sure what to expect. The way she spoke to him - as if they were close, as if they were family…As if he were a child still, and had not seen more than a thousand years in his life. Slowly, Legolas let his pack slip onto the ground, but hovered where he was, unsure whether to step forward or back. There was a part of him, some strange, childlike part of him that automatically wanted to step forward…but his doubt and his fear held him back.
He should leave. He did not know what she was trying to say, but he did not like it; it made no sense, for her to talk to him as if she knew him, when he did not so much as know her name.You should greet me with a smile and a peck to my cheek… But she was familiar to him. Her voice summoned up vague memories, long forgotten, of a lullaby sung into his ears as he fell asleep in smooth elvish song. Her hair made him think of small hands running through brown tresses just like those, fingering braids and wishing for his own some day…
No. This was madness. Legolas shook his head, closing his eyes briefly, as if he could erase the scene in front of him. “I do not understand,” he said, and his voice was low, wavering. “You speak as if you were…” It could not be. The connections he was making, they were pure dream, nothing more. “My naneth is dead. You cannot be her.”
“Dead indeed. Slain ages ago by one who...” Thranduil’s face that day surfaced in her memories and quickly she killed the thought. “A rose that welt into the ground and spent her ages alone in the Halls of Mandos with no starlight over her head and no spring to warm her... That was your mother.” She whispered, the memories as haunting as her death.
The halls were bleak, cold. She waited to go to Aman, to find herself once again in the company of her kin and her love. Each time she faced the judge he decided the blessed realm was not in hers to enter, and the years that stretched showed her how lonely she was.
Showed her how much she missed her beloved.
Then he released her. But instead of waking in the realm of the Eternal, she ended here. Returned to a king who was so far broken and would not look upon her face. Returned to a son who knew not her.
“And yet here she is.” She has never heard her voice so small. So afraid. As soon as the words fall from her mouth she wondered if this was a revelation better suited for Thranduil to tell his son. Not the ghost of what she once was.
Though it was too late now.
She looked from him, not wishing to see his reaction. Her body turning away from her little green leaf, “Forgive my brashness. I-” She knew if she kept going she would hear her voice break... “Forgive me, my prince.”
gummygunk
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
