#it's implicit

[sweetchimera-art]

🟣 Mirror Image 🟢

[Art Site]

[tomshivbaby]

oh mondale, we're really in it now

[roselightfairy]

@quarantinedwanderer prompted Legolas and Glóin last week, and I finally got a little something written for it. This follows on the heels of something I, uh, am currently working on writing but have not posted yet, though it is referenced in a few of my other stories - a friend breakup between Gimli and some of his good pre-series friends - so if it makes no sense, that’s why. Or also it is because I haven’t edited this at all and have forgotten how to write, haha. The story also ended up echoing Well Lived a lot, so I kind of leaned in once I realized that was happening.

Also, this wasn’t done intentionally, but the story kind of straddles the first two days of @tolkiengenweek, family and friendship, so - shall we call it a fill? It does involve a romance between Legolas and Gimli, but to my mind the friendship and the family are the deeper themes of this one.

...

Glóin was waiting in the sitting room when Legolas left Gimli’s rooms at last, half-sunk in a comfortable chair with one hand tapping anxiously at the haft of his walking stick. He looked strangely shrunken like this, diminished without the powerful presence of his certainty – but that crumpled look lasted only seconds, for his head snapped up as soon as Legolas entered the room.

“How is he?” he asked urgently. “Does he” –

“He is” – And what was the honest answer to this question? “Not angry,” Legolas said at last. “But he will not come down again tonight, I think.” He would not have himself, could he not imagine so vividly Glóin’s concern at Gimli’s distress, the way his worries would climb with every second Gimli did not return. “He bade me make our excuses and our good-nights.”

“But he is – why?” Glóin gave his walking stick such a hefty jolt that it teetered and nearly slid to the floor. “What in my words distressed him so? Does he not want to reconcile with his friends?”

Legolas had not meant to stay here for so long, but he could not resist: he crossed the room to rescue Glóin’s walking stick, nestling it more comfortably into the notch carved into the chair – the one that had appeared there, unremarked, between this visit and the last, as the stick had become Glóin’s constant companion rather than occasional irritation. His fingers nearly brushed the wrinkled hand resting in an arthritic clench on the armrest, and his heart swelled with something he could not name.

“It is not so simple,” he said, as gently and as cautiously as he could. Gimli’s thoughts were his own to reveal, but he could not leave Glóin in such distress over a casual comment. “You do not know how deep was the hurt at their parting. I think it is too soon to say, for now.” He did not mention how Gimli had fretted in the weeks leading up to their departure, concern for his aging parents warring with his reluctance even to encounter his old friends in passing. Did not mention the way Gimli had crumpled when he finally told Legolas what had broken between them, the way the hurt still flashed in his eyes at any reminder. Glóin had not seen it, perhaps, at his casual suggestion that Gimli visit his friends and “hammer out those dents at last,” a bare few months after that fragile trust had shattered.

Gimli was – he did not like to say delicate, for fear of wounding Gimli anew with even the thought, but who could not be? And now he would not even look his father in the face again this evening, for fear of what he might say or feel.

“But I don’t” – Glóin looked up at Legolas almost beseechingly, and for a moment Legolas felt as though he had been lurched backwards in time with the recoil of a bowstring, as though he were his older sister staring down into his own eyes, wide with some helpless pleading for something, anything, to be otherwise. “They were such dear friends,” Glóin said, as though begging for Legolas’s understanding, his agreement. “I do not understand how Gimli can shudder so at their very names.”

“Dearer friendships may cause deeper hurts,” Legolas said, the words drawn from somewhere deep inside him, some knowing born of a thousand years of love, a long-feared loss. “And – and not all treasures last.”

“Well do I know that,” said Glóin, and his gaze traveled around the sitting room as though he looked somewhere beyond it. “So do we all, all who live here. But I had hoped . . . hoped this might last beyond my” – He broke off, and did not finish, but Legolas could fill in the last word well enough.

Death. The spectre that had haunted these last years with Gimli, so present in Glóin’s words, in every heavy sagging line around his eyes. Only Glóin thought not of Gimli’s death, but of his own – and what would be left for Gimli after it.

Did Gimli too have these thoughts?

“Who can say,” Legolas said at last. “But – if there is anything I have learned, it is that loss is the only constant.” He spoke softly, to keep his voice from breaking, but the words echoed in his chest as though he had shouted them.

“And yet,” Glóin said, the bewilderment falling away, his voice sharp and shrewd, “you know as well as I that not all losses are survivable.”

Legolas’s throat thickened. “Perhaps better,” he said, his voice fallen to a whisper.

“Perhaps.”

Silence fell between them, heavy with false promises and unshed tears, with a forever whose infinite string spooled nearer and nearer to the end. Legolas yearned to return to Gimli’s arms, to comfort his husband and himself in closeness, and yet he could not leave like this.

“This will be.”

He said it before he could second-guess the words, the ferocity of his certainty. The promise of forever was false, but this would not be. He would be sure of it.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I will ensure it.” He reached out, before he could think better of it, and let his hand fall onto Glóin’s, tension thrumming in his muscles against the papery skin stretched over knobby bone. “Whatever comes of this friendship – whatever comes after. Gimli will survive it; I will ensure it.”

Another silence. Glóin stared at him, his lips pursed in just the way Gimli stared when he was taking someone’s measure, when he was deciding whether to grant his approval. Lined as his face was, sunken as his eyes, there were still moments when Legolas could see Gimli so clearly in his father’s face.

“I believe you,” he said at last with a sigh. “I would believe it regardless, but you are – Gimli is” – He shook his head. “I am glad he has you.”

“I am glad to have him,” Legolas said softly, his eyes blurring with unexpected tears. “I will not let him go so easily.”

“No,” said Glóin, and now Legolas wondered if he too thought of Gimli’s friends who had left his home, had given up on his new world – or if he thought of his own death – or if he merely thought of Gimli, and all that he was to so many people. “No, I know you will not.”

[roselightfairy]

hm that fanfic trope where Glóin tells Legolas he’s not like his father as a compliment and sign of welcome and Legolas agrees with him...don’t like it...

[roselightfairy]

What’s this? Halbarad and the Rangers come? And Elladan and Elrohir bringing word from Elrond? Elrond didn’t travel here himself in magic haste only to leave again? And Aragorn is actually going to have a group with him when he takes the Paths of the Dead? Fancy that!

[roselightfairy]

Hmm, Gandalf noticing that the beacons of Gondor are already lit as he and Pippin ride there. Almost like the people of Gondor...know how to handle themselves without Gandalf...and are led by someone competent...

[roselightfairy]

Well, in a marathon 84-page reading session today, we finished the story of Lord of the Rings.  (I’m still going to read her select bits from the Appendices, but the main part is over now.)  The Fellowship is reunited, and then breaks for good at last, the hobbits return home and the Shire is not quite as they left it.  So...observations!

1) Frodo and Sam WAKE UP and then have to go to a massive celebration and get praised and surrounded by people only hours later.

2) How do they get praised?  WITH GREAT PRAISE.  That line is repeated so often that I eventually started just making gesturing motions at Z until she said the line for me.

3) There’s a line about how they had “the best harpers, who harped better than everyone else” or something like that, and, uh, Tolkien?  Just why?

4) Ioreth, at Aragorn’s coronation: “He is not so soft of speech.”  HAHA she’s still stung.

5) Faramir and Eowyn.  It started out so well, and so sweet, and an actually very comforting romance . . . and then somehow it turned so awful, when Faramir with a patronizing speech mansplains Eowyn’s feelings to her and then declares his love, and she decides that she doesn’t want to fight anymore and now the Love of a Good Man has Healed Her Woes.  We’ve decided to ignore that part and just accept the sweet parts.

6) “...and when they returned Legolas was silent, and would say only that Gimli alone could find fit words to speak of them...” I’ve already said everything that needs to be said.

7) Z has a deep attachment to Bill the pony - her car is named Bill - and we were so glad to see him returned safe.

8) THE SCOURING OF THE SHIRE.  I love, absolutely LOVE, how confident and powerful our four hobbits have become, and how much they stand out returning home. Pippin’s line, “We shall break a good many things yet, and not expect you to answer,” and everything about the hobbits flouting the rules!  And MERRY with the Horn of Rohan, commanding his troops! Goosebumps many times during that chapter.

9) If Rosie Cotton and Arwen are added together to make one, the count of Women Who Do Things stands at 4.

10) THE ENDING.  Z wept actual tears in the driver’s seat, and I wasn’t far behind.

The Appendices are all that remain, and then this journey will be over!

[roselightfairy]

“Pippin’s heart sank. He did not relish the idea of singing any song of the Shire to the Lord of Minas Tirith, certainly not the comic ones that he knew best; they were too, well, rustic for such an occasion. He was however spared the ordeal for the present. He was not commanded to sing.”