Summary: Legolas hadn't gotten around to reading all the letters you've sent him.
WC: 1k
Warnings: established relationship, long distance, reunion, a single use of y/n (for a letter), gender neutral reader, a bit of an AU (deal with it :3)
A/N: this idea has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while now so why not finally write it out and post it lol.
Being in a long distance relationship with Legolas wasn't exactly easy. He was constantly moving around, not knowing where he would end up next. Going on many adventures was one of his shall we say 'hobbies' and he enjoyed them, but it never gave him any time to write or send letters to his beloved. He could only imagine how many were waiting for him when he finally returned home. So many questions flooded the elf's mind. How worried were you? Were you angry with him for not replying? Would you understand his side of things if he were to finally answer?
Only time would tell as he was finally headed home after a few grueling months of adventuring. He made a mental note to stay put for some time so he could receive and reply to your letters. It was your only form of communication at the moment, living in different kingdoms complicates things, but you somehow made it work after all this time. He wouldn't stop now. Upon his arrival, his father greeted him and explained how letter after letter came for him during his absence. That was one mystery solved, but another one stood. How frantically were you sending them for his father to mention them.
As he entered his chambers, he look and saw a decent pile of letters, all addressed from you. A sigh left his lips, he felt terrible not being able to reply to any of them while he was away. Instead of reading through every single one of them, he grabbed the one from the top of the pile. It was the most recent one you've sent him, the scent of your floral perfume spritz onto the letter made him smile. He loved when you added that little bit of personality to your letters. It always reminded him of your time together. He opened the letter and began to read.
Dearest Legolas,
I have to say I'm quite disappointed with you not replying to any of my letters. I understand you like to go out adventuring, but normally you're not gone for this long. I know I've sent quite a few messages by now, please give the king my sincerest apologies, but I am very worried about you, my love. Are you injured? Are you safe? So many question race through my mind during the day.
But I digress, I've decided to surprise you with something. I'm coming to your kingdom fairly soon. Most likely when you finally receive and read this letter, I will already be on my way there. There is no stopping me, and fret not. I have someone escorting me there so I will be quite safe on my journeys. I hope to see you greet me when I arrive.
Your love,
~[y/n]
He reread the letter several time, looking over your signature at the bottom of the page. After a moment, it finally clicked in his mind. You were coming to Mirkwood. How long until you arrived? Did he have time to wash up? He didn't want to greet you in dirty attire after so many months apart. He took that chance, washing up and putting on fresh, clean clothes. Once he was finished, he could hear the sound of hooves in the distance, just near the gates. There was no doubt about it, it had to be you. Legolas made his way down to where you had finally dismounted your horse and smiled when he spotted you.
"My love!" He shouted from a distance, still walking towards you.
You looked around and finally saw him making his way towards you. A big smile formed on your lips as you full on sprinted in his direction, dropping your bag off your shoulders and throwing yourself into his arms, "My darling Legolas!"
He twirled you around and laughed, "Oh my love, I missed you so much. It's been so long since we've been together!"
Legolas placed you back on your feet and kissed your forehead. You looked into his eyes, "Oh my dear, it truly has been far too long. But I do plan on staying in town for a little bit if your father is alright with it."
"He will have no choice but to be fine with it. You'll be staying in my chambers for the duration of your stay. We have to much to catch up on." His hands rested on your hips as he spoke, "I'm sorry I couldn't reply to your letters.
You shook your head, "It's alright, my love. After the first week or so I figured you were either busy with things or simply not in Mirkwood."
"I was out on an adventure. It took much longer than I originally expected. I would've sent one to tell you, but I had no time to sit down and write. I read the most recent one though when i returned, about your arrival."
"So that's why you smell so fresh and look fresh out of the bathtub. You got all clean up just for me?" You questioned him with a devious smirk on your face.
The tips of his ears turned pink, "Yes, I didn't wish to greet you in filthy clothing or to smell like a rat den when you arrived."
You kissed the tip of his nose, "I'm just teasing, love. Don't worry about it."
He walked and grabbed your bag and threw it over his shoulder, "Come, we can continue to talk in my room. But first I'm sure my father would want to see you. Believe it or not, he enjoys your company."
You followed him to the throne room and greeted Thranduil with a bow. A small smile formed on the king's lips as he welcomed you back to the kingdom. You and Legolas headed to his room where you both caught each other up with what had happened in your lives during your separation. You both eventually agreed that every few months, a rendezvous was needed to keep you two sane.
Summary : As the final battle reaches its darkest moment, Legolas finds himself racing desperately toward the one person who matters most. There, he gathers you into his arms, confessing everything he had held back—his love, his regrets, and the truths he wished you had known sooner. But even with him by your side, fate remains unchangeable, as some endings are written long before they arrive.
A/n : Finally! We've made it to the part where it led to this whole story happening in the first place! Yes, younger me loved angst lmao. It was hard to rewrite it tbh, cause younger me wrote this so freaking bad! I almost had a seizure reading it. Plus, I was so busy with work, I've developed a freaking writing block again! So do pardon my bad wordings and typos >< I hope yall see and read the vision i had for this haha (might edit if its terrible lmao), enjoyy <3 (Part of the f!reader is not from middle-earth series | Can be read as a one-shot as well!)
Warnings: blood/injured, major character death!, angst, hurt/comfort, war!
Wc : 12k
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Back in Dale, Gandalf stood amidst the chaos of battle as human spearmen and archers drove their weapons deep into the hide of a massive troll. The beast let out a furious roar, thrashing wildly before finally collapsing beneath the relentless assault.
Nearby, Gandalf swept his staff in a swift motion, striking down an approaching orc before turning his attention back to the battlefield. His expression remained hard, yet beneath it lingered the faintest glimmer of hope despite the carnage surrounding him.
"We may yet survive this," Gandalf spoke, his voice steady despite the sounds of war raging all around him.
"Gandalf!" Bilbo shouted suddenly, his voice cutting through the noise as his eyes remained fixed on something beyond the hill.
He stood frozen at the wall, his breathing uneven as he stared into the distance, unable to tear his gaze away from the figures moving far below. The concern on his face was unmistakable, his brows drawn together as unease settled heavily in his chest.
Hearing his name, Gandalf immediately hurried over to where Bilbo was standing, his robes sweeping behind him as he moved. Reaching the wall, he followed the hobbit's line of sight and looked out across the battlefield.
There, riding along a narrow spur of the mountain, were Thorin, Dwalin, Fili, and Kili, making straight for the place where Azog waited.
"It's Thorin," Bilbo breathed, the name leaving his lips as he watched the distant figures. Anxiety clouded his face, his eyes remaining fixed upon the distant riders, following each of their movements with growing unease. His heart quickened for them, though he could do nothing but watch.
"And Fili, Kili... and Dwalin," Gandalf continued, narrowing his eyes as he studied them from the wall. "He's taking his best warriors." His expression darkening as he recognized exactly what Thorin intended.
"To do what?" Bilbo asked, turning quickly toward him, his brows drawn together in confusion. There was worry in his voice now as he searched Gandalf's face for an answer.
Gandalf did not answer at once. His gaze remained fixed upon the narrow mountain path where the four riders were slowly vanishing from sight. His expression grew grave, his eyes hardening with quiet understanding before he finally spoke.
"To cut the head off the snake,"
"Gandalf!" The voice rang out from behind, rising above the clash of steel and the cries of battle.
At the sound of his name, Gandalf turned at once, his robes sweeping lightly with the movement. "Legolas... Legolas Greenleaf," Gandalf stared, recognition flashing across his face as he watched the elven prince approach with urgency written plainly in every hurried step.
"There is a second army! Bolg leads a force of Gundabad orcs. They are almost upon us!" Legolas announced, his voice steady despite the haste of his arrival. His eyes remained fixed upon Gandalf, the weight of his warning plain upon his face.
"Gundabad..." Gandalf murmured, the word lingering on his tongue as his brows slowly drew together.
For a moment, his gaze swept across the battlefield below, taking in the tide of war with growing unease. Then, he'd seemed to have understood something, his expression growing increasingly grim as the pieces finally fell into place.
"This was their plan all along," he said quietly. "Azog engages our forces, then Bolg seeps in from the north."
"Wha... the north... where is the north, exactly?!" Bilbo asked in a panic, quickly turning toward Gandalf with widened eyes. His gaze darted anxiously between the wizard and the battlefield, desperately trying to understand what was happening as worry tightened every feature upon his face.
"Ravenhill," Gandalf answered without hesitation. Turning immediately, he strode toward the parapets with long purposeful steps, his eyes lifting toward the distant hill where Thorin and the others had ridden only moments before.
Standing at the edge of the wall, his gaze remained fixed upon the towering height shrouded in the haze of battle, knowing all too well that Ravenhill was where Thorin now stood.
"Ravenhill..." Bilbo repeated quietly, his face draining of what little colour remained as the dreadful realization struck him. His eyes widened as he looked toward the distant hill, his heart sinking deeper with every passing second. "Thorin is up there! And Fili and Kili... they're all up there!"
At the sound of Kili's name, Tauriel, who had been standing silently behind them stiffened almost instantly. Alarm flashed across her face as she lifted her gaze toward the peak of Ravenhill, her emerald eyes searching desperately through the thick mist that shrouded the mountain.
While the others remained focused upon the distant hill, Legolas found himself unable to keep his thoughts fixed upon Ravenhill alone.
His eyes instinctively swept across the battlefield below, searching endlessly through the countless warriors locked in battle, yet unable to find the one person he longed to see.
All he could think about was you, and amidst the chaos of war, the smoke, and the endless sea of soldiers, it had become almost impossible to find you. If only he had known... he would never have left you alone in the first place.
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In a brief moment of uneasy peace amidst the chaos of war, Thranduil walked slowly through the battered streets of the city. With each measured footsteps, it carried him past the countless fallen bodies scattered across the ground.
His gaze lingered upon the fallen, many of them his own elves who had given their lives in battle. It was a sight no king wished to behold, yet his expression remained composed, revealing little of the grief that weighed heavily beneath his calm exterior.
The silence endured only a moment before one of his commanders came running toward him. The elf halted at a respectful distance, lowering his head as he awaited his king's command.
"Recall your company," Thranduil ordered. Though his voice carried its usual authority, there was the faintest tremor beneath it as his eyes remained fixed ahead, never once turning from the path before him.
Upon the words of the elvenking, his commander immediately obeyed, raising a great horn to his lips before sounding a powerful blast that echoed across the battlefield.
Gandalf came hurrying toward them, his grey robes billowing behind him as he crossed the war-torn streets. Every step carried the weight of urgency, and the concern etched upon his face only deepened as he approached the Elvenking.
Stopping before Thranduil, he looked upon him with a grave expression, knowing there was little time left. "My lord, dispatch this force to Ravenhill! The dwarves are about to be overrun. Thorin must be warned."
For a moment, Thranduil said nothing.
Then, slowly, his gaze moved beyond Gandalf, falling upon the battlefield that surrounded them. The bodies of his fallen elves lay scattered across the streets, their armour dulled by ash and blood, their lives spent defending a land that had already taken far too much from them.
"By all means," Thranduil finally replied, his voice calm yet carrying a deep bitterness beneath its surface. "Warn him."
His eyes remained upon the fallen. For the briefest of moments, the unshakable composure of the Elvenking broke. A flicker of sorrow crossed his features, almost too subtle to notice, but it was there—the weight of every soldier lost, every life he had failed to bring home.
A king could command armies, but he could not bring back the dead.
The expression then vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, replaced once more by the familiar mask of royal composure. Turning away without another glance, he continued forward with deliberate strides, forcing himself not to look back.
"I have spent enough Elvish blood in defense of this accursed land—no more."
"Thranduil?!" Gandalf called after him, disbelief and frustration evident upon his face, as he watched the Elvenking walk away without looking back. His brows furrowed deeply, his hands tightening around his staff whilst he stood rooted in place, unable to hide the disappointment in his voice.
"I'll go!" Bilbo's voice cut through the tension as he stepped forward, his small frame carrying a determination far greater than his size suggested. Worry still lingered in his eyes, but he lifted his chin firmly, refusing to retreat from the danger that lay ahead.
"Don't be ridiculous! You'll never make it!" Gandalf answered at once, turning sharply toward the hobbit with widened eyes.
"Why not?" Bilbo asked, looking up at Gandalf with knitted brows. Though fear still rested beneath his expression, it did nothing to shake the resolve in his voice as he waited for the wizard's answer.
"Because they will see you coming and kill you!" Gandalf said firmly. His grip tightened around his staff as he faced the hobbit, his expression leaving no room for argument. Gandalf was absolutely determined to stop Bilbo from throwing himself into his certain death, that's for sure.
"No, they won't."
Gandalf looked at Bilbo peculiarly, his brows furrowing deeper as confusion briefly overtook the urgency upon his face. His eyes searched the hobbit's expression, trying to understand the quiet confidence behind those unexpected words.
"They won't see me," Bilbo stared back, the corners of his mouth barely moving as his hand instinctively drifted toward the pocket that concealed his greatest secret.
'It's out of the question—I won't allow it!" Gandalf continued to disagree, taking a firm step forward as his voice echoed with unmistakable authority. His expression hardened, yet the worry in his eyes betrayed that his refusal came not from anger, but from a desperate wish to keep Bilbo alive.
"I'm not asking you to allow it, Gandalf," Bilbo said quietly, as he held the wizard's gaze.
For a long moment neither of them spoke, the sounds of battle filling the silence between them before they finally exchanged a small, understanding nod. Without another word, Bilbo turned and strode away, disappearing around a nearby corner.
Reaching the shelter of a narrow alcove, Bilbo pressed himself against the stone wall before slipping a small golden ring from his pocket. He stared at it for a few quiet moments, his expression thoughtful as the familiar weight of responsibility settled upon him once more.
Taking a steady breath, he slowly slid the ring onto his finger, vanishing from sight in an instant. Hidden beneath the Ring's magic, Bilbo ran swiftly through the battered city, weaving between the last desperate clashes of the battle.
Through the Ring-enhanced vision, the elves seemed to appear as radiant beings of brilliant white light while the orcs took the form of dense, shifting shadows.
His eyes darted from one skirmish to another as he continued onward, searching for the safest path through the fights.
That was until a brilliant light suddenly caught his attention in the distance, streaking across the battlefield with incredible speed. Even through the Ring's strange vision, its radiance was so overwhelming that Bilbo instinctively flinched, quickly pulling the Ring from his finger as the brightness almost blinded him.
As the world returned to normal, his eyes widened with recognition when he realized it was you, galloping forward like a bolt of light before he noticed the direction in which you were heading.
"Oh no," Bilbo gasped, dread washing over his face as the realization struck him. Without wasting another second, he turned sharply on his heels, sprinting back through the city as fast as his legs could carry him.
Still struggling to catch his breath, Bilbo hurried back to where he was before. The air around the rest felt tense, as though he had returned in the middle of an uneasy moment. Yet he paid it no mind, his thoughts consumed entirely by what he had just seen.
Bent over as he fought to steady his breathing, Bilbo's lips moved several times, your name escaping in broken whispers before he finally managed to force the words out clearly. "She's—she's going after them!" he panted, both hands braced against his knees as he lifted his head to look up at them, panic written plainly across his face.
Legolas' brows furrowed deeply the moment Bilbo spoke, his expression tightening as concern washed across his face with immediate intensity.
He did not even need confirmation to understand the name Bilbo had struggled to say. For deep down he had already known, had always known up to now, even as he silently tried to deny it within himself.
His jaw tensed, a flicker of dread crossed his features, his gaze locking onto Bilbo with sharp urgency. In that moment , it seemed as if the surrounding chaos had slowly begun to fade for a moment beneath his rising panic.
"Where is she?" Legolas interrupted at once, his voice strained and breath hazy, as urgency overtook every trace of calm he had left. His eyes searched Bilbo's face frantically, unable to steady himself for even a second, panic clearly etched itself across his expression now.
"She's going to Ravenhill—" Bilbo managed to answer between ragged breaths, still bent forward as he tried to steady himself.
The moment the direction was spoken, the air around them seemed to change. A heavy silence fell, and every eye turned toward the distant peak of Ravenhill.
Legolas looked there at once. His gaze fixed upon the dark silhouette in the distance as panic took hold of him. In an instant, it all came running back to him, your destined fate. The one you cried over, the one you feared over, the one he couldn't force himself to believe would happen to you.
Without another thought, he stepped forward. His pace quickened with every stride, as though some unseen force was drawing him toward the mountain. His face remained set, his eyes unwavering, for every part of him already knew where he had to go.
"Legolas," Thranduil called out firmly, his voice cutting through the urgency like steel as it reached his son.
Legolas paused mid-step, turning back slowly to face his father. The Elvenking stood tall before him, every inch the ruler of his people, his expression composed and resolute. Yet beneath that unyielding authority lingered something far harder to conceal.
There was a plea in his eyes, restrained but unmistakable, as though he wished to call his son back yet lacked the words to do so.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
There was a silent battle between them—one wishing for the other to stay, to not throw himself into danger, while the other had already chosen the path he could not turn away from. Thranduil's silence carried the weight of a father's fear, while Legolas' carried the certainty of someone who knew there was no other choice.
And Legolas understood. If he stayed here, if he allowed himself even a moment of hesitation, he knew that decision would follow him for the rest of his life.
His jaw tightened as he held his father's gaze one final time. Or perhaps, in that moment, he was no longer looking upon his father, but his king. The silence between them stretched endlessly, filled with all the words they could not bring themselves to say.
And in that single look, Thranduil saw it once more. It was as though he were staring back at a younger version of himself—a son who carried the same unwavering determination, the same stubborn resolve that refused to bend once his heart had chosen a path.
The sight was painfully familiar. All of this for a love that will never be guranteed.
Slowly, Legolas turned away. Breaking eye contact for real this time, he sprang onto a riderless horse and gathered the reins firmly in his hands.
Without another word, Legolas drove the horse forward with urgent force, launching himself into motion as he rode toward Ravenhill at full speed. Determination burned in his eyes as the battlefield swept past in a blur, the wind rushing fiercely against his face while the sounds of war faded into the distance behind him.
Legolas drove the horse forward at relentless speed, the wind tearing past his face as the chaos of the battlefield blurred into streaks of motion and sound beneath him.
Every thunderous strike of the horse's hooves against the broken earth drove him forward, faster and faster. Yet his mind no longer belonged to the battle raging around him. There was only one thought that remained, one name that echoed through him again and again like a silent vow he refused to break.
His grip tightened around the reins until his knuckles turned pale, his jaw set so firmly that it ached. As though determination alone could challenge what fate had written, as though his will could bend the future away from the one thing he feared most.
No matter how far Ravenhill loomed ahead, no matter how impossible the distance seemed, all he could think was that he could not let you get hurt, not now, not ever.
But it will never be easy. Fates never been well, at least to him. The path ahead grew steeper and harsher as he pressed onward, the horse straining beneath him while debris and shadowed remnants of battle flashed past in violent bursts.
Memories of you surfaced unbidden in his mind, each one sharper than the last. Your presence intertwining with every breath he took, as though you were the only thing anchoring him to purpose.
Fate could not be allowed to take you, not when you deeply mattered to him, that you were alive and well.
As Ravenhill drew closer, the air itself seemed heavier, filled with mist and the distant roar of battle that made every second feel stretched and fragile.
Legolas leaned forward over the horse's neck, urging it onward with quiet desperation, his expression set in a rare mixture of fear and resolve that betrayed how much was at stake.
The thought that he might arrive too late clawed at him, but he pushed it away relentlessly, refusing to let doubt slow him even for a bit.
In his heart, there was only one truth now: your death would not be your fate, not while he still had breath, not while he was still moving toward you.
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There you stood beside the horse, staring at it as though it were some wild creature you had no intention of trusting. Its calm breathing and occasional shift of weight only seemed to make you more uncertain, your eyes narrowing as you studied it like it might suddenly decide to throw you across the battlefield.
"Yeah, no..." you muttered quietly beneath your breath, shaking your head as you looked it over. "I don't really like you."
You took a deep breath, briefly looking away as though you needed a moment to gather every bit of courage you had left. Then, reluctantly, your gaze returned to the horse.
When you looked back, the horse was still there, still looking at you in that annoyingly patient way. Your face immediately twisted into offended disbelief. "Quit staring would ya?"
All you could see was its stupid face staring right back at you, almost like it was judging you or mocking you for even considering this.
"Ugh, I can't believe I’m doing this…" you huffed, grabbing onto the saddle as you tried to force yourself upward, your hands slipping slightly as you searched for balance.
With a frustrated groan, you pushed off the ground with one foot, then the other, struggling awkwardly as your body refused to cooperate the way you wanted it to.
After a few clumsy attempts, you finally managed to haul yourself up, barely getting your weight over the saddle before you flopped into place with a small jolt. "Hoo… alright…" you said afterward, a faint hint of pride slipping into your voice as you exhaled.
Adjusting your grip on the reins, you tried to look compose now that you were technically in control, even though your earlier struggle still very much haunted your dignity. "Look at that… professional rider," you whispered to yourself with fake confidence, immediately side-eyeing the horse again.
You took a few quick breaths, staring ahead as your hands tightened around the saddle. Every bit of confidence you could gather was forced into place as you prepared yourself to finally move.
And the moment you did, the horse suddenly jolted into motion, neighing loudly as it surged ahead with both front legs lifting slightly, its energy snapping forward like a release of tension.
"What the fu—" The words barely left your mouth before a scream followed.
You immediately grabbed onto the horse, arms wrapping around it as tightly as possible while the world around you became nothing but a blur of movement. The wind rushed past your face, your heart practically leaping out of your chest as you desperately tried to stay on.
"Why are you so fast?!” you yelled at the horse like it could understand you, your legs clinging awkwardly as you tried not to immediately become airborne. "I just got up here, can we chill?!"
Your body moved awkwardly with every step, your balance constantly threatened as you struggled to understand the rhythm of riding. Every second felt like another near disaster, and for a moment, you were certain you were about to become a very unfortunate piece of battlefield decoration.
But slowly, somehow, you adjusted. Through nothing but instinct and stubborn determination, your grip became steadier. Your posture shifted, your movements began matching the horse’s pace, and the panic slowly gave way to focus.
You were still terrified of course, but at least you were no longer one second away from falling off.
Your breathing slowly began to steady as you forced your eyes shut for a brief moment, trying to ground yourself amidst the chaos surrounding you.
The sounds of battle, the cries of warriors, and the thunder of hooves all blurred together, but you pushed them aside. Instead of focusing on everything happening around you, you turned inward, searching for that familiar warmth of your own power.
With a sharp inhale, you activated your powers.
The world around you seemed to shift. Time itself appeared to slow, every movement outside your immediate control stretching and softening as though the battlefield had been submerged beneath still water. The clash of weapons, the movements of your enemies, even the rushing figures ahead became clearer, easier to predict.
In contrast, your own movements sharpened. Your senses heightened, your reactions quickened, and every second felt as though it belonged entirely to you.
Of course, the ride itself was still anything but graceful.
Every powerful stride of the horse sent a harsh jolt through your body, threatening to throw you from the saddle with every passing moment. You fought to keep your balance, gripping tightly as you leaned with the movement of the beast beneath you.
From the corner of your vision, movement began to appear from every direction. Of course they'd come at you now.
Orcs surged into your path from every direction onward, forcing your body to move before your mind could even catch up. Your hand immediately found the hilt of your blade, drawing it in one swift motion as the steel flashed beneath the battlefield light.
Using the horse's momentum, you leaned into the movement and swung in a wide arc. The edge of your blade cut cleanly across an approaching orc’s chest before you smoothly shifted your grip.
With a quick twist of your wrist, you reversed the strike, catching another enemy that had rushed toward you from the side.
Crimson droplets scattered through the air with every strike, catching the light for only a fleeting moment before vanishing beneath the thunderous rhythm of the horse's hooves.
Your blade moved continuously, flowing from one motion into the next, every slash and turn carrying you forward without allowing the battle to slow your path.
Even then, the horse refused to slow its reckless pace. You were forced to move with it, ducking beneath wild swings of rusted axes and twisting away from desperate hands reaching for your legs.
With every passing second, your confidence in riding grew ever so slightly, though your occasional panicked yelps whenever the horse made an unexpected turn proved you were still far from mastering it.
Somehow, against all odds, the two of you barreled through the battlefield together, surviving one impossible stretch after another until the rough terrain ahead finally became too steep for the horse to continue.
Pulling firmly on the reins, you guided the horse to a stop, finally bringing its relentless pace to an end. Carefully, you climbed down from the saddle, your feet touching the ground once more as your legs immediately wobbled beneath you, still trying to adjust after the wild journey.
You let out a long, exhausted breath, standing there for a moment as you regained your balance. Then, turning toward the horse, a small, sheepish smile slowly found its way onto your face.
Despite everything, you had to admit it had gotten you this far.
You reached out and gently patted its neck, looking at the creature with a mixture of gratitude and disbelief. "I forgive you for your impulsive decisions, by the way," you said softly, the corners of your lips lifting with quiet amusement.
The horse simply stood there for a moment before beginning to wander away, leaving you behind as it disappeared further along the mountain path. You watched silently, a faint smile lingering on your face until it was finally gone from sight.
Only then did you turn around. Your gaze lifting toward the steep hill towering before you, its rocky slope disappearing into the mist that cloaked Ravenhill.
The smile slowly faded from your face, replaced by quiet determination as the weight of what lay ahead settled heavily upon your shoulders.
Gritting your teeth, you drew a slow breath before stepping forward without another moment's hesitation, forcing yourself onward despite the exhausting climb as each step carried you higher and closer to the summit.
Your legs burned with the effort and your breathing gradually grew heavier, but you never once stopped moving until, at last, you reached the top.
The cold wind of Ravenhill greeted you immediately. It swept fiercely across the mountain peak, tearing through your hair and sending countless snowflakes swirling through the air.
You narrowed your eyes against the freezing gusts, carefully stepping across the uneven ground as the harsh weather made every movement more difficult.
Your cloak fluttered wildly behind you, forcing you to pull it closer around yourself as you searched the vast white landscape ahead. Your eyes moved from one side to the other, desperately looking for any sign of life.
It was then that something caught your attention—a trail of crimson staining the otherwise untouched snow, fresh drops continuing forward one after another, their stark contrast against the white sending an uneasy chill racing down your spine.
Your footsteps slowed right then. You could not tear your eyes away from the trail before you, watching as each drop of crimson marked a path through the snow.
With every passing second, your breathing grew quieter, shallower, as though your body already understood what your mind was desperately trying to deny.
A painful knot formed in your stomach. Your fingers slowly curled into trembling fists at your sides, your hands tightening as fear began to take hold. Your brows drew together, and your expression shifted as countless terrible possibilities rushed through your thoughts, each one more frightening than the last.
For a moment, you simply stood there. Unable to move. Unable to look away.
"...No..." you whispered beneath your breath, shaking your head ever so slightly as though refusing to believe what the trail before you might lead to.
Then you looked up. There laid someone ahead, entirely motionless. Your eyes widened instantly, as your heart seemed to stop beating altogether. Your body then began reacting before your mind could even have the time to process what it had seen.
You broke into a run without hesitation, stumbling through drifts that reached your knees, your boots slipping against the frozen ground as you desperately fought to reach them.
You fell hard onto your knees, the impact against the ice barely registering. The cold bit through you, but you ignored it, scrambling forward through the snow with desperate urgency until you finally reached the figure lying motionless before you.
"...Fili..." His name left your lips as nothing more than a fragile whisper. The moment you saw him, everything inside you seemed to stop.
Your expression fell apart, disbelief washing over your face as you stared at him, your mind refusing to accept what your eyes were seeing. He looked so still. Too still.
"No... no, no, no..." you repeated frantically, your trembling hands hovering uncertainly over him, moving from his shoulder to his arm before pulling back again. You were completely lost, panic was already consuming you with every thought in your mind.
"Please... please..." Your voice cracked as tears gathered in your eyes, blurring your vision. With shaking hands, you placed them over him, closing your eyes tightly as you reached deep within yourself and gathered every remaining trace of magic you had left.
A warm golden light slowly spread beneath your palms, flowing gently across him as your magic carefully mended every visible wound, every cut gradually fading until they were no longer there.
Hope flickered desperately across your tear-stained face as you waited, your breathing held captive by a fragile belief that perhaps—just perhaps—it had worked. "...Come on..." you whispered, your voice breaking beneath the weight of your desperation.
Your eyes remained fixed upon him, searching for the smallest sign of movement. "...Please wake up... please..." The words grew weaker with every repetition, carrying a desperation you could no longer hide.
The wounds that had once covered him slowly faded beneath the warmth of your magic, every cut and injury healing as though they had never been there. But nothing else seemed to have changed.
His eyes, though no longer clouded by pain, remained open, fixed upon a sky they could no longer see. No matter how desperately you wished otherwise, you knew deep within your heart that it was already too late. Your magic could heal what had been broken... but it could not call back someone who had already slipped beyond its reach.
You lowered your head, resting your forehead gently against his shoulder as the strength you had been desperately holding onto finally began to disappear.
The grief you had kept buried broke through all at once. Tears spilled freely down your cheeks, falling into the snow beneath you as your body trembled. A quiet sob escaped your lips, fragile and broken, carried away by the cold wind that swept across Ravenhill.
"...I'm sorry..." you whispered. Your voice was barely louder than the whispering wind around you, the apology leaving your lips with a pain that felt far too heavy to carry. It lingered in the silence of the mountain, spoken to someone who could no longer answer.
For what felt like an eternity, you remained there. Your arms stayed wrapped around his cold body, your thoughts empty, your mind unable to process anything beyond the unbearable ache in your chest.
Slowly, your head lowered until it rested against his chest. For a moment, you almost wished that if you listened closely enough, if you stayed there long enough, you would hear it again.
His heartbeat. The sound that had once meant he was still here.
"Liar..." you whispered, your voice trembling beneath the weight of your grief.
They were all liars. The promise of meeting again. The feast he'd had spoken of as though it was something certain, something waiting for them beyond this battle.
It was never supposed to end like this. Not this. Not a goodbye. Maybe you'd see yourself gone, but you just couldn't see them be the one to go.
Minutes had passed before you finally forced yourself to move. Slowly, and painfully, you pulled away, your hands lingering for a moment longer than they should have before you let go.
Standing again felt impossible. Your body moved as though it no longer belonged to you, every motion slow and unsteady beneath the weight of what you had lost. The grief threatened to pull you back down, to make you stay there forever.
But somehow, you managed to rise. Even with tears still clinging to your face, even with your heart feeling heavier than ever before, you stood.
Your tears did not cease, nor did the ache that hollowed out your chest. Yet somewhere beneath that crushing grief, something else began to take root. The sorrow that had threatened to consume you slowly hardened into a quiet, unyielding resolve.
Your eyes, once clouded with helplessness, now carried a different light, one sharpened by vengeance for the one who had torn everything away. Slowly, your trembling hands curled into fists until your nails bit into your palms.
You drew in a long, unsteady breath. It caught painfully in your throat before leaving you just as shakily, as though even breathing had become an effort. Piece by piece, you gathered the fragments of your shattered heart, forcing yourself to hold them together for just a little longer.
Because falling apart now would save no one.
Your gaze slowly lifted, finding the ancient stone staircase that climbed higher into the mist-covered heights of Ravenhill. The worn steps disappeared into the white beyond, their end hidden from sight, yet you stared at them as though there was only one path left for you to take.
Kili. His name echoed relentlessly through your mind, drowning out every other thought. At least you could still save him.
You had to.
Without giving yourself another chance to hesitate, you broke into a run. Your boots struck hard against the weathered stone, the sound echoing through the mountain as you climbed higher with every desperate step.
Your lungs burned for air, your legs protested beneath the strain, and the freezing wind cut through your cloak as though it wished to drag you back.
But none of it mattered. You pushed onward, ignoring the exhaustion clawing at your body, refusing to slow for even a second.
The higher you climbed, the louder the sounds of battle became. The clash of steel echoed through the frozen air, accompanied by the guttural cries of orcs and the sharp ring of blades striking against one another. Though hidden by the thick veil of mist, the battle felt impossibly close now, each sound urging you to move faster.
Your heartbeat pounded against your ribs, matching the frantic rhythm of your footsteps as you pushed yourself forward with every ounce of strength you had left, desperately praying that you had not arrived too late.
The ruined paths of Ravenhill twisted endlessly before you. Each turn seemed to promise an end, only to reveal another stretch of broken stone disappearing into the mist. The tower itself felt determined to delay you, making every passing moment seem unbearably long.
Then, at last, the path opened before you. You stumbled into a clearing overlooking the battle, your breath catching as your eyes searched desperately through the swirling mist.
And there, you saw him.
Kili was locked in combat against two orcs, his sword moving desperately as he fought to keep them at bay. Every strike forced him back another step, leaving him barely enough time to catch his breath. Relief hit you first, followed almost instantly by panic as you realized just how close you had come.
"Kili!" you screamed at the top of your lungs, your voice breaking as it echoed across the distance while you rushed toward him as quickly as your legs would carry you.
But the clash of weapons, and the desperate struggle surrounding him drowned out your voice completely, leaving him far too occupied to hear you.
Still, you refused to stop. Your fingers tightened around the hilt of your blade until your knuckles whitened, your breathing growing harsher with every step as you desperately fought to close the distance between you.
The cold wind lashed against your face, the mist parting only for brief moments before swallowing the battlefield once more, but your eyes never left Kili for even a heartbeat.
Then, without warning, movement burst from the drifting veil of mist beside you. A towering figure emerged with terrifying force, its hulking form cutting through the white like a nightmare brought to life. Bolg.
You barely had time to react. With brutal force, he swung at you, the sheer strength behind the blow leaving you no chance to defend yourself.
Your eyes widened in shock as the impact struck, hurling you violently across the battlefield before your body crashed against a jagged outcrop of stone.
Pain exploded through your back. The force of the collision drove every breath from your lungs, leaving you gasping soundlessly as the world spun around you.
All you could hear was the dull ringing in your ears, drowning out the cries of battle and the clash of steel until everything blurred into one endless, disorienting haze.
"Kili!..." your voice faded almost instantly into the chaos, swallowed by the ringing in your ears.
Your vision wavered as you struggled to lift your head, every movement sending another wave of pain through your body. The rock at your back felt impossibly cold, your limbs heavy and unresponsive as the scene before you dissolved into shifting fragments of movement and shadow.
Across the battlefield, Kili finally turned, his face snapping toward you the moment he recognized your presence. His eyes widened instantly, shock and fear flashing across his features as he saw you lying there among the chaos.
He shouted your name, his voice raw and desperate as he took an instinctive step forward, his focus breaking away from the fight for just a moment. Panic was written clearly across his face, but the sound of his voice reached you only as a distant echo, swallowed by the haze clouding your senses as your vision continued to blur and distort.
Then, slowly, warmth began to return to your body as your magic activated on instinct, golden light flickering faintly beneath your skin and spreading through your wounds.
Your breathing steadied little by little as the pain dulled, and your sight gradually sharpened, pulling the world back into focus as the blur around you slowly cleared.
Relief barely had time to settle before horror replaced it completely as your vision locked onto the scene unfolding ahead.
Your breath caught sharply in your throat as the scene you feared most began to play out directly in front of you once again.
There it was, currently happening before your eyes with terrifying precision. Every detail returned with cruel familiarity, as though fate itself had been waiting patiently to prove that it could never truly be escaped.
"...No..." Your voice was scarcely more than a breath, as you watched it all. You could only stare, frozen in place as your body refused to respond. Every muscle screamed at you to move, to run, to stop what was happening before your eyes, yet the pain still weighed heavily upon you, keeping you trapped in that single moment of helplessness.
With brutal ease, Bolg had seized Kili by the head, forcing him off balance as the young dwarf struggled against the crushing grip. In his other hand, Bolg lifted his heavy mace, the wicked, pointed end angling toward Kili's chest.
Time seemed to slow right then. Your eyes widened in horror, every instinct screaming at you to move as the image before you mirrored the one that had haunted your mind for so long.
In that split second, everything continued to slow as Kili was thrown back, his body lifting into the air before falling toward the ground. And as he fell, your eyes found his across the battlefield.
His expression softened the instant he saw you. Tears had already gathered in his eyes, reflecting the sorrow and fear written across your own face. But even then, there was something painfully familiar in his gaze.
He had seen you.
He had understood.
A small smile slowly appeared on his face, gentle and painfully familiar. The same kind of smile he always gave you, as though even now, even at the very end, he was still trying to comfort you in the only way he knew how.
Still trying to tell you that everything would be alright.
That was the last image you saw of him, before he fell still against the cold ground. And that sight shattered something inside you.
"No—!" The cry ripped from your throat, raw and broken, as your entire body trembled beneath the weight of what you had just witnessed. Tears blurred your vision almost instantly, spilling freely down your cheeks as you stared ahead in disbelief, unable to accept the reality before you.
Your hands reached out without thought, trembling as your fingers stretched toward him. As though closing the distance, even by a little, could somehow change what had already happened.
The world around you seemed to fade into a distant haze. Every sound muffled and every movement painfully slow, as if time itself had chosen to stop while you remained trapped within that single moment.
The silence that followed was then shattered by movement within the mist. A figure emerged slowly from the haze, and the moment Tauriel's eyes fell upon the scene before her, everything changed.
Her eyes widened the moment she saw what had happened, disbelief flashing across her face before it quickly twisted into something far more painful. Shock gave way to grief, and grief turned into a burning fury that consumed every trace of hesitation within her.
The pain in her expression was unmistakable. She had lost him.
And Bolg was the one standing before her.
Without a moment of hesitation, Tauriel charged toward Bolg, her blades flashing through the mist in a storm of rapid strikes. Every movement carried the weight of her grief and fury, each blow fueled by the pain she could no longer contain.
Bolg answered back with equal brutality, meeting her attacks with overwhelming strength as their weapons collided again and again. Each clash sent sparks flying into the cold air, scattering snow beneath their feet as neither of them showed any willingness to yield.
You forced yourself up, you had to. Your legs were still shaking violently beneath you, struggling to stand, while your vision still blurred with tears as you tried to move forward.
But even with every ounce of strength Tauriel poured into the fight, it was becoming clear that she was being pushed beyond her limits. Her anger and grief drove her forward recklessly, leaving openings that Bolg quickly exploited as his overwhelming strength forced her back step by step.
Then came one final, devastating blow. With that one final brutal strike, Tauriel was sent flying through the air, her body crashing down beside you in a heap of broken movement and shallow breaths. She landed hard against the ground near you, her strength momentarily gone as she struggled to push herself up.
You immediately turned toward her, your eyes widening in alarm as your chest rose and fell with sharp, uneven breaths. Seeing her lying there, wounded and unable to continue, something inside you finally broke.
"NO—!" rage erupted from you in a raw, broken scream as you saw her fall. Whatever control you had left disappeared in that instant, replaced by a rage so overwhelming that it burned away every trace of pain that still lingered.
You surged forward without a second thought, your grip tightening around your weapon as fury replaced grief. Your vision cleared right there and then, your focus narrowing until there was only one thing before you.
You ran, and every step burned. Your magic surged outward in waves, bending perception itself. The air around you then began to stretch and distort, slowing everything in Bolg's path while you moved through the gaps with unnatural speed.
Each strike you made came in bursts—fast, and precise with your blade flashing in and out of slowed motion as you exploited every opening.
Bolg swung at you with brutal force, but you slipped right through it. Your movements were sharp and unpredictable as time itself seemed to fracture around you like it did back at the battlefield.
Bolg's expression remained frozen between moments, unable to comprehend what had happened. Even the blood that spilled from the wounds seemed trapped in time, flowing outward in slow, crimson streams that caught the light before falling silently to the ground.
Your final strike landed with devastating precision. His massive frame staggered backward, his balance breaking as he dropped heavily onto one knee.
A low, guttural groan escaped him, his hand pressing against the ground as he struggled to remain upright. The strength that had once seemed unstoppable was finally beginning to fade.
You stood there barely holding yourself together after it was done, your entire body trembling from exhaustion as each breath left you harsh and uneven.
The adrenaline that had carried you this far was slowly disappearing, leaving only the unbearable weight of your injuries and the limits of your own body. With it, a cough suddenly ripped through you unexpected. You doubled slightly, as blood spilled from your lips then, dark droplets falling onto the untouched snow beneath your feet.
The sight blurred before you. The edges of the world began to fade again, your strength slipping away faster than you could grasp onto it this time. You could feel yourself slipping, your body barely holding itself together.
Then— A hand suddenly reached out from behind.
Before you had any chance to react, it seized you and dragged you backward with brutal force. Your body twisted in shock as your breath was stolen away, fingers tightening around your neck and cutting off the air you desperately tried to draw in.
Your eyes widened as you were forced to turn, and there he was—Bolg. Still alive, still standing.
His grip remained firm and unforgiving, holding you in place as though he had never intended to let you escape. His expression carried a cruel satisfaction, almost amused by your struggle.
"You bastard…" you forced out, the words strained and broken as you clenched your teeth. Both of your hands immediately reached for his arm, fingers digging into his thick skin as you fought desperately against the force holding you in place.
Bolg only smirked at you. A cruel, satisfied smirk slowly spread across his face as he watched your struggle, taking pleasure in the anger and helplessness written across your expression.
The sight alone sent something hot and violent burning through your chest, your lips curling into a quiet snarl as your eyes sharpened with fury.
You refused to give in. Even as your strength faded, even as your vision threatened to blur once more, your mind searched desperately for anything that could give you an advantage.
Your eyes moved past him, and thats when you saw it.
The edge of the cliff.
Gritting your teeth hard, you commited. With whatever strength remained within you, you shifted your weight, forcing your exhausted body to move despite the pain coursing through every part of you.
Bolg's grip tightened as he realised too late what you were attempting, but you had already made your choice. With one final burst of strength, you threw yourself forward, dragging him along with you.
Together, the two of you crossed the edge of the cliff, disappearing into the mist below.
The moment you went over the edge, everything turned black. The world vanished beneath you, as though the hill itself had swallowed the last pieces of your strength and left nothing behind but silence. The pain, the noise, the battle—all of it disappeared, fading into nothingness.
You had no sense of time as you drifted in and out of consciousness. The cold started fading, the battle as well, even your own thoughts dissolving into distant fragments you could no longer grasp.
Then, from the depths of that endless darkness, something stirred.
At first, it was no more than a distant echo, so faint you could scarcely tell whether it belonged to the world beyond or to the fading corners of your own mind. It called your name again and again, each time a little clearer, drawing you toward it as though guiding you through the thick veil that lay in-between.
Your consciousness answered reluctantly. Your eyelids fluttered, heavy as stone, resisting every attempt to lift them. A shallow breath caught in your chest as awareness returned in fractured pieces, each one slow to find its place, until the silence around you was no longer empty but filled with the quiet rhythm of another's voice.
With great effort, your eyes finally opened. Your vision blurred painfully as you forced your eyes open, shapes forming above you until a figure finally came into focus. There he was, the person kneeling close with urgent concern etched across his face.
"…Legolas?" Your voice came out as little more than a weak whisper, hoarse and fragile as you struggled to lift your head. The moment you tried to move, exhaustion immediately pulled through your body, every ache and injury reminding you of how close you had come to collapsing completely.
At the sound of your voice, Legolas' expression shifted. The tension in his face softened slightly, relief flickering through his eyes, though it was quickly overshadowed by the worry that remained. Leaning closer, his eyes remained fixed on you.
"Yes… it is I," Legolas answered quietly, his voice steadier than his expression as he studied you closely, his brows drawn together in concern. "You are alive… but barely," he added, his gaze scanning your condition before he spoke again, more firmly this time, "Tell me… are you in a state to stand?"
The moment his words reached you, something inside you snapped fully back into urgency. Pushing yourself up despite the pain, your movements were rushed and unsteady, your breath catching sharply as your body protested against the sudden effort.
"Kili…" you muttered immediately. Ignoring the concern in Legolas' eyes, you looked past him, already trying to push yourself forward as though determination alone could carry your failing body onward.
Legolas straightened slightly, his expression tightening as he stepped into your path. "No," he said firmly, his voice calm but unyielding as he looked down at you. "You will go nowhere in this state. You can barely remain upright."
"I don't care!" you snapped back, your voice breaking with desperation as you tried again to move forward, your hands shaking as you fought against your own weakness. "He's still there—if I don't—"
"Listen to me," Legolas interrupted, his tone sharper now. He leaned closer, his eyes searching yours with a mixture of worry and urgency, trying to make you understand what you refused to accept. "You will not reach him like this. You will fall long before you ever see him again."
You shook your head immediately. "No..." The word came out weak, yet filled with stubborn refusal. You tried to push yourself up again, your hands gripping against whatever support you could find as your trembling legs struggled beneath you. "I can still go."
Legolas' expression tightened as he watched you fight against your own body, his concern deepening when he saw how desperately you were forcing yourself forward.
"You are barely standing."
"I don't care." The answer came too quickly.
Your breath trembled as you fought against the tears threatening to spill again, your fingers curling tightly as you tried to force your unsteady body to move. Every part of you was exhausted, every movement painful, yet none of it mattered when your mind was still fixed on him.
"I have to save him, Legolas." Your voice cracked. "I can't just stand here while he's—" The sentence died in your throat.
"While he's there... cause I refuse to believe."
You looked back at him, and for a moment, all the walls you had built around yourself crumbled. The fear, the guilt, and the helplessness you had been carrying since the moment you saw Fili and Kili fall were all laid bare in your eyes.
"I was already too late once..." The confession came out as a fragile whisper, barely carried by the cold air between you. Your gaze lowered, your voice shaking as the weight of those words settled heavily upon you. "I can't let it happen again."
You looked back at him once more, tears gathering in your eyes as your determination fought against your breaking heart. "I cannot be too late again."
Legolas fell silent, his expression softening as he saw the desperation behind your stubbornness. He understood the pain in your eyes, but he also saw the truth you refused to acknowledge.
You were willing to break yourself completely if it meant reaching him.
A brief silence fell between you, heavy with the weight of everything neither of you could bring yourself to say. Before you could gather the strength to argue again, Legolas moved without warning, stepping forward and lifting you into his arms in one swift motion.
His hold was firm but careful, catching you before your weakened body could give out completely, his expression tightening as he felt just how little strength you had left.
"Legolas—!" you gasped in surprise, your eyes widening as your hands instinctively reached for his shoulder, startled by the sudden movement. For a moment, you tried to resist, your fingers tightening as if you could still force yourself out of his arms, but the exhaustion that had been consuming you finally won.
Your strength faded almost instantly, your body growing heavier against him as you reluctantly allowed yourself to lean into his support.
"Rest," he said softly, his voice carrying a quiet reassurance despite the worry still evident in his eyes. "I will not let you fall."
The fight within you slowly disappeared at those words. Your protest died before it could leave your lips, your grip gradually loosening as exhaustion finally overtook you.
Your head lowered against his chest, and for a moment, all you could feel was the warmth of his arms around you and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath your ear.
It was calm. Steady. A quiet contrast to the chaos you had endured only moments before. The sounds of battle, the cries of the wounded, and the weight of everything you had lost slowly faded into the distance as that single heartbeat became the only thing you could focus on.
➽──────────────────────────────❥
Reaching the top in heavy silence, Legolas carried you through the mist-covered ground. His steps remained steady despite the exhaustion weighing upon him, his arms never loosening around you as though he feared that the moment he did, he would lose you too.
The moment your eyes lifted, you saw Tauriel—kneeling beside Kili's still form, her face streaked with tears and dirt, her expression shattered in a way you had never seen before.
Your chest tightened painfully at the sight, a dull ache spreading through you as Legolas carefully lowered you to the ground. But the moment your feet touched stone, you were already moving.
"Kili…" you breathed, your voice barely audible as you stumbled forward. Your legs gave out halfway, forcing you to catch yourself before pushing forward again, limping desperately until you finally collapsed onto your knees beside him.
The cold seemed to seep into your bones as you stared at his face—still, pale, and lifeless in a way that made your stomach twist violently. "No…" your lips trembled as tears filled your eyes almost instantly, spilling down your cheeks before you could even stop them.
Your hands lifted shakily, hovering over him as golden light began to flicker weakly between your fingers, your magic responding to your desperation before you could even control it. "No, no, no… Kili, please…" you whispered, your voice breaking as you leaned closer, your entire body shaking uncontrollably.
You pressed your hands over him, forcing every remaining ounce of strength you had into your magic, desperately willing it to reach him, to bring him back.
The golden glow grew brighter, spreading across your hands as the warmth of your power surrounded him. But the more you gave, the heavier your body felt, your breathing growing uneven as your strength slowly began to disappear.
"Don't do this… please don't do this…" Your voice cracked as tears fell freely, landing against his cold skin. "You can't go yet... you can't leave me..."
Your hands trembled harder as you fought against the exhaustion consuming you, refusing to stop even as your vision began to blur. "I can't lose another one..." you whispered, the words barely holding together as they left your lips. "Not you too..."
"Please, Kili... please just wake up..." you pleaded, your voice growing weaker with every word. "Please... just open your eyes..."
The golden light continued to burn between your fingers, but it began to flicker as your body struggled to keep up. Every breath became harder, every second draining what little strength remained within you.
"Stay with me... please..." Your voice fell into a broken whisper. "You can't just leave me like this... you're being too selfish..." But no matter how desperately you tried, no matter how much of yourself you poured into him, your body was already reaching its limit.
Still, you refused to stop, even as your magic burned hotter than it should, even as your hands shook uncontrollably over him.
Time continued to slip away, each passing moment feeling heavier than the last as the glow from your hands grew weaker and weaker.
Your breathing became ragged, every breath catching painfully in your chest as you fought to keep your eyes open, refusing to surrender no matter how exhausted you'd become.
Gritting your teeth, you forced more magic through trembling hands that could barely stay steady. "Come on..." you whispered hoarsely, frustration creeping into every word. "You can't just stop working now..."
You pushed harder. Your entire body trembled beneath the strain as another wave of magic flickered uncertainly around your hands before faltering once more.
"Don't be this useless..." you panted, never once looking away from Kili, your entire world narrowing to the hope that refused to die inside you. Blood slowly trickled from your nose, staining the snow beneath you, but you didn't even notice it.
"Come on... come on... come on-!" you repeated desperately, until the words finally dissolved into a cry of complete helplessness.
"Stop it!" Legolas' voice cut sharply through the silence as he stepped forward without another moment's hesitation. His hands closed firmly around your shoulders before pulling you back, gently at first, then with enough strength to finally break your reach.
Even as he drew you away, your eyes never left Kili. They remained fixed upon him, desperately memorizing every detail, as though looking away would mean accepting a truth you simply could not bear.
Only when the distance between you had grown did you finally blink, your gaze slowly lifting to meet Legolas'. His expression had completely changed.
The calmness he carried so effortlessly was gone, replaced by anxious eyes that searched every inch of your face. It lingered on the blood beneath your nose, your trembling hands, your pale complexion, and the way your breathing refused to steady.
Tears stained your cheeks, your eyes swollen and glistening as they met his. The concern in his gaze was quiet, almost unbearably gentle, and somehow that made it even harder to remain composed.
Your lips quivered as another sob threatened to escape, shaking your head weakly before the words tumbled out. "No... no, no..." you pleaded, your voice breaking. "I can heal him. I can still do it."
Legolas' brows drew together, pain flashing across his face as he held your shoulders a little more firmly. His voice was low, steady, and filled with reluctant sorrow. "No." He swallowed before continuing. "No... you cannot."
"I can!" you cried, trying to pull away from him despite your exhausted body. "I can, okay?! Just let me try!"
His grip tightened instinctively. "Look at yourself!" Legolas exclaimed, fear finally breaking through the restraint in his voice as his eyes searched yours desperately.
"You are exhausting every last piece of yourself. You are pushing your body beyond its limits." His breathing was uneven now, his composure cracking beneath the weight of watching you fall apart. "Must I lose you as well?" he asked quietly, the anger in his voice giving way to unmistakable fear. "If you do not stop... there may be nothing left of you."
"He's gone," Legolas continued quietly, the words leaving his lips with visible reluctance, carrying a sorrow that was gentle rather than unyielding.
His eyes lingered on you instead of Kili, as though he feared the truth would wound you more deeply than any blade ever could. Even as he spoke, his expression remained soft, the pain in his gaze betraying how difficult those two words had been to say.
The reality settled over you with crushing weight, slow and inescapable, until your eyes drifted back toward Kili once more. He layed utterly still, his face pale beneath the cold mountain light. The silence surrounding him was so loud, almost deafening to you.
Your lips parted slightly, but no words came, your gaze still refusing to leave him as though you could somehow will him to move if you simply looked long enough.
Yet nothing changed, and that unbearable stillness finally shattered the last of your hope. "I'm sorry..." you whispered, voice trembling so faintly it was almost lost to the wind.
You lowered your head, letting the tears slip quietly onto the snow as your shoulders gave a small, defeated shake. "I'm so useless... I always am..." The words came out barely above a breath, spoken more to yourself than anyone else, carrying years of doubt that seemed to surface all at once.
At last, the fight haddrained from your body. Every muscle that had been held together by desperation suddenly gave way right then, as your knees buckled beneath you.
Before you could fall, Legolas stepped forward without a thought, catching you securely with both hands. His movements were quick but careful as he steadied your weight against him.
His brows knit tightly together as he looked down at you, his eyes searching your face with unmistakable concern.
They lingered on your pale complexion, the tear tracks upon your cheeks, the blood beneath your nose, and the exhaustion that had stolen nearly all the strength from your body.
For a brief moment, he simply looked at you, his expression softening with quiet care, relief flickering across his face that he had caught you before you hit the ground
"Come," he said gently, his voice calm despite the worry that still lingered beneath it. "Perhaps my people will have a remedy for the strain your body has endured. There may yet be an antidote for this over exhaustion."
As he spoke, he carefully guided one of your arms over his shoulders before lifting the other into place, making certain your weight rested securely against him.
Though his movements remained composed, there was an unmistakable urgency behind them. His jaw set tightly without you noticing, and his eyes never straying far from you, as though his only concern now was getting you somewhere safe before you were next to fall victim to cruel fate.
Walking beside Legolas, you could barely remember how you had even left. Each step began to felt distant, as though your body was moving on its own while your mind drifted somewhere far behind.
Your eyelids were becoming heavier by the second, and no matter how hard you fought to keep them open, the darkness at the edges of your vision continued to creep inward.
You felt it. You knew what was coming.
The weakness spreading through your body was impossible to ignore now, settling into every limb until even lifting your foot became a struggle. You tried to take another step, gritting your teeth against the exhaustion, but your legs simply refused to obey.
They buckled beneath you without warning, your entire body pitching forward as your strength finally gave out.
The sudden movement caught Legolas off guard for only a moment. Instinct took over before thought could, and he immediately tightened his hold around you, preventing you from falling completely.
His brows drew together in alarm as he lowered himself quickly, carefully catching you before you could hit the frozen ground. One arm of his supporting your back while the other steadied you against him.
He gathered you into his arms without hesitation, cradling you close as his eyes searched your face with growing concern, every trace of composure beginning to crack beneath the fear of watching you fade before him.
You could barely hear him. His voice sounded distant, muffled beneath the relentless buzzing filling your ears. Yet you thought you heard him say your name. The sound came again, a little clearer this time. "...Are you alright?"
Those were the only words that truly reached you. The world then continued to blur, followed along with that strange buzzing wrapping around you in an almost comforting silence.
But beneath that stillness was still fear, quiet at first, before growing stronger with every shallow breath you took.
Your chest tightened painfully, your breathing becoming quicker and more uneven as you desperately tried to draw in enough air, only to feel your lungs refusing to cooperate.
"Legolas.." you managed to whisper, your voice trembling as your eyes searched frantically through the haze, trying to find his face among the blur.
Your gaze darted back and forth until you could just barely make out his outline leaning over you. "It's… so cold…" you said shakily, your breathing growing faster as panic slowly settled in.
"Why is it so cold?" Your lips trembled as you tried to move your hands, lifting them slightly toward him, but the effort barely lasted. Confusion flickered across your face when you realized how little you could feel, your fingers barely responding despite your desperate attempt.
"I... I can't feel my hands..."
The fear in your voice struck Legolas more deeply than any blade ever could. He could only stare back at you, his lips parting instinctively with no words abled to be spoken, every thought caught somewhere between panic and disbelief.
His eyes searched your face desperately, as though looking hard enough would reveal an answer, but there was none. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Legolas found himself without a solution. The helplessness that gripped him in that moment frightened him more than any enemy he had faced upon the battlefield.
He instinctively drew you closer, his arms tightening around you with careful strength, almost as though he could shield you from whatever was happening simply by refusing to let go.
And somehow, that was one of the few things you could still feel.
You shifted weakly against him, your trembling body seeking whatever comfort it could find as another wave of exhaustion washed over you. Your fingers curled faintly into the fabric of his tunic, holding onto him with the last bit of strength you had left.
"I'm so scared..." The confession barely left your lips. Your breathing trembled as your eyes fluttered, struggling to remain open, struggling to stay present.
"I don't want to die..." A shaky breath escaped you, and the fear you had been desperately trying to hold back finally broke through. "I don't want to..." Your voice cracked completely, the words dissolving into a quiet sob as you clung to him, terrified of the silence waiting beyond the pain.
Legolas' lips moved again. Nothing. Nothing left his trembling lips. His chest tightened until it almost hurt, his heartbeat racing as he watched you struggle in his arms, every shallow breath you took making his own feel heavier.
His hands shifted beneath you uncertainly, adjusting their hold as though terrified that even the slightest mistake would make everything worse. "You are not going to..." he finally managed, the sentence faltering before it was complete.
But his voice failed him. Moisture gathered at the corners of his eyes despite every attempt to remain composed. He lowered his head briefly, taking a slow, uneven breath as though trying to regain control of himself. But the fear remained, heavy and undeniable.
"No..." he whispered, almost to himself before looking back into your eyes. "No... you will not." The words trembled as they left him, fragile beneath the weight of everything he could not bear to lose. "You cannot."
Slowly, one of his hands rose to your face, his fingertips hesitating for the briefest moment before gently cupping your cheek.
Your skin was frighteningly cold beneath his touch, and the realization settled heavily inside him, stealing what little composure he had left. His thumb brushed softly across your cheek, lingering there as though trying to warm you, while another shaky breath escaped him.
"Forgive me..." he murmured, his voice scarcely louder than the wind. "I never meant to leave you alone in the forest." His eyes lowered briefly, unable to meet yours as guilt washed across his face.
"I was afraid... more afraid than I wished to admit. After what you said... I feared you were right." He swallowed hard, forcing the words out despite the ache in his throat. "So I walked away." At last, his gaze returned to yours, filled with quiet regret. "I was a coward."
Hearing his confession, you could not help the small smile that found its way onto your face, faint and fragile though it was.
Your lips curved ever so slightly despite the exhaustion weighing upon you. Your eyes softening with it, as you looked at him through the haze clouding your vision. It was almost bittersweet.
This... this was the very moment you had seen countless times within your visions, unfolding exactly as you had always feared it would.
"You know..." you whispered, your voice weak and uneven as you struggled to gather enough breath for each word. "I was... a bit hurt..." The smile never quite left your face, though it trembled faintly at the corners, carrying more sadness than resentment.
Legolas looked back at you, relief washing quietly across his features as he saw that smile, however faint it was.
His shoulders seemed to ease ever so slightly, and for the briefest moment, the panic in his eyes gave way to something gentler.
A small, rueful smile tugged at his own lips before he lowered his gaze. "I know," he admitted softly, the regret in his voice unmistakable. "It was... an awful thing for me to do, was it not?"
"It sure was..." you answered, letting out the faintest breath of what almost sounded like a laugh before a flicker of pain crossed your face. You closed your eyes for a moment, steadying yourself before speaking again. "...Pull me in closer."
He did not hesitate to. Legolas carefully adjusted his hold, drawing you closer against him with the greatest care. One arm supported your back while the other settled securely around you, his forehead nearly brushing yours as he instinctively tried to shield you from the bitter wind.
His warm breath fanned softly across your face, a strange contrast against the cold that had settled deep within your body. It felt unfamiliar now, distant somehow, yet it grounded you just enough to keep yourself from drifting further away.
Your eyes slowly lifted to meet his once more, lingering there before your lips parted again. "You lied to me too..." you murmured quietly. "I know what you said to me... back at the tree."
Legolas froze. The words struck him immediately, and for a long moment, he simply looked at you in silence. His expression faltered, guilt flickering plainly across his face as his eyes searched yours, unable to find a single excuse worth speaking.
"...That is on me," he said at last, lowering his head with a slow, defeated breath. "I told myself... I would speak the truth when I returned. I thought there would be time."
You studied him quietly before speaking again, your voice scarcely louder than a whisper. "Then... tell me now."
Legolas closed his eyes briefly, drawing one slow, unsteady breath before opening them again. They glistened with tears he no longer had the strength to hide.
"I love you," he whispered, the words leaving him with a tenderness that made his voice tremble. "I have loved you... ever since we were children. Through every passing season, every journey, every year we spent apart... it has always been you." His hand gently brushed your cheek, his thumb trembling against your skin.
"You are everything to me. More than I ever found the courage to tell you." His breath caught painfully.
"I cannot lose you," he continued, his voice cracking as tears finally slipped down his cheeks. "Not again." He shook his head helplessly, struggling to steady his breathing.
"For so long... I believed you had abandoned me. I thought you had left me beneath that tree... to wait for you through the passing years... alone... forever, like my..." His words caught in his throat, he just couldn't bring himself to finish. Instead, he lowered his forehead gently against yours, his shoulders trembling as quiet tears continued to fall.
His tears fell silently against your skin, warm against the cold that had already begun to consume you. Each drop carried a weight far heavier than words, a sorrow you had always known existed but never wished to see reflected in his eyes.
It was the pain you had imagined in your darkest moments—the unbearable ache of watching someone you loved break apart before you, the kind of hurt that settled so deeply within your heart that even breathing became difficult.
And yet, even then, even with everything slipping away, you found enough strength to offer him the smallest piece of yourself that remained. “Hey… you look ugly when you cry, you know?”
For a moment, Legolas said nothing. His forehead remained pressed gently against yours, his breath trembling as he stayed there, as though moving even an inch away from you would make this moment disappear.
His eyes remained closed, his expression broken in a way you had never seen before, before he finally gave the faintest nod. It was such a small movement, almost nothing at all, but it carried everything he could not bring himself to say.
A quiet laugh escaped you, fragile and weak, yet somehow still filled with the warmth he had always known from you. The sound was quiet, but it carried a faint warmth that made the sadness between you feel a little lighter, even if only for a moment.
"You crybaby…" you whispered, the words teasing, though your voice carried a tenderness that hurt far more than any goodbye could. Your eyes remained on him, trying to hold onto the sight of him for as long as you could, as though memorizing every detail would somehow allow you to keep him with you.
Silence embraced the two of you afterward. Neither of you spoke for a while, allowing the quiet to stretch as your gaze remained on him, memorizing the face before you.
Then, after what felt like you had gathered every last bit of strength left within you, your lips parted once more, the words you had been holding back finally finding their way forward.
"I love—" The confession barely escaped before your voice faded away, the remaining words never reaching the air as your entire body suddenly went still.
The warmth and strength that had kept you holding on seemed to disappear all at once, leaving you limp in his arms as your fingers loosened.
Feeling the absence of your breath against him, Legolas slowly lifted his head.
For a moment, he did nothing.
He simply stared. His mind refusing to understand what he was seeing, refusing to accept the silence that had replaced your trembling breaths only moments before. He remained frozen, as though the world itself had stopped with you, before the fragile composure he had been desperately clinging to began to fracture.
His eyes widened, and the calm he had desperately tried to maintain shattered completely.
"No..." he whispered, his voice barely audible as he searched your face for any sign of response. He spoke your name softly at first, almost as if calling you back gently would be enough, but when you did not answer, panic quickly began to take over.
"Please..." he breathed, his voice trembling as his hands moved to hold your face carefully.
His hands moved to your face, holding you with a tenderness that almost seemed afraid to exist. His fingers trembled despite how carefully he touched you, his thumbs brushing against your cold cheeks as though he could somehow bring back the warmth that had been there moments ago. "Open your eyes... please."
The word was no longer a request. It was a prayer.
But the silence that answered him was cruel.
Every passing second carved deeper into his heart, each moment without your voice, without your laughter, without the warmth of your presence, becoming something he could not bear.
Legolas pulled you closer against him, holding you with a desperation that bordered on fear. His arms wrapped around you as though he could protect you from this, as though refusing to let go could somehow undo what had happened.
As though he could hold onto you tightly enough that fate itself would be forced to return you to him.
His forehead lowered against yours once more, his breath shaking as he closed his eyes.
And for the first time in a very long time, Legolas Greenleaf—the elf who had stood fearless before armies and darkness—was left powerless against the one thing he could not fight.
The thought of losing you.
He shook his head slowly, almost as though denying the reality before him could somehow make it disappear.
Tears gathered in his eyes, blurring the world around him as his breathing grew uneven, each breath heavier than the last. "No... no, please..." The words trembled from his lips, barely holding together beneath the weight of the fear consuming him.
The sight of you like this was something he could not bear. His hands trembled as he gently shook you again, calling your name with growing desperation. "Please... stay with me." His brows furrowed, his face twisting with helplessness as tears finally slipped down his cheeks.
Slowly, he lowered his head until his forehead rested against yours once more, his breath shaking as he struggled to keep himself from falling apart.
"I told you everything..." he whispered, his voice fractured by the pain he could no longer contain. "I finally did... but why must you leave me now?"
His fingers remained against your cheek, refusing to move away, holding onto the last trace of warmth he could find. "I love you," he said quietly, "Please... do not leave me alone again."
Legolas could no longer hold himself together.
His arms tightened around you, drawing your cold, motionless body closer until there was scarcely any space left between you.
He cradled you carefully, his fingers trembling as they clung to you. Somehow, he was still afraid the slightest careless movement might hurt you.
A broken sound escaped him then, a quiet whimper that he could no longer hide as his face twisted with grief and disbelief.
For a moment, he stayed like that, refusing to move, refusing to accept the silence that surrounded him. He listened desperately, waiting for the sound he just had been hearing moments ago.
But there was nothing. The steady rhythm he had held onto, the proof that you were still there with him—was gone.
Tears slipped down his face without restraint now, falling silently as he pressed closer, his lips trembling as he struggled to form words.
Each breath grew harder than the last as he remained perfectly still by your side, unwilling to pull away from you.
His hand moved slowly to your cheek again, his thumb brushing gently against your skin as though memorizing the feeling of you one last time.
He stayed like that for what felt like an another eternity, still listening. Listening for the quiet rhythm that had always been there. But alas, silence answered him back yet again.
His expression crumpled completely as the truth finally settled over him, while another helpless sob broke free. All he could do was hold you closer, his embrace becoming almost instinctive.
The wind swept softly across, stirring strands of his hair as he remained kneeling upon the frozen stone, his arms never once loosening around you.
He held you there in silence, his forehead still against yours, his arms wrapped around you as if love alone could keep you with him.
It was too late. Fate had claimed you, just as you had seen in every vision that had haunted your waking hours.
No matter how desperately you had tried to outrun it, no matter how many choices you had changed or sacrifices you had made, it had found you all the same.
In the end, the future you feared had not disappeared—it had only led you here. The mountain stood silent, whilst the wind continued to swept gently across. Snow drifted between the ruins, settling quietly upon the scarred earth as though the world itself had begun to mourn.
Everything continued as it always would. Everything except you. Legolas remained there motionless. His eyes never left your face, afraid that the moment he looked away, this would become real in a way he could no longer deny further.
His fingers still rested against your cheek, unwilling to surrender even the smallest point of contact, while his arms held you as carefully as if you might awaken from nothing more than a deep sleep.
But you never did.
All the words left unsaid, all the moments stolen by fear, all the years spent waiting—they lingered between you now, far heavier than either of you had ever imagined.
The confession had come. The truth had finally been spoken. Yet it had arrived only when there was no time left to live it.
Warnings ⚠️: Canon typical violence, author attempts elvish, suggestive content, alcohol consumption, angst, blood, medical care, feelings of despair, themes of hope, found family, multiverse/time travel, cussing, angst, fluff, eventual smut, weapon use, realities of battle, tolkein monster encounters, panic responses,fish out of water, injury to main characters, death of a side character, long fic, slowburn x reader.
Part 2 | Part 3 - Coming Soon
Sundering of Paths - Chapter One
The Raining of Mushrooms & Feet
The evenings were your favourite kind of ordinary. No deadlines, no emails, no obligations beyond the simple, uncomplicated act of putting one foot in front of the other and letting your mind go quiet.
You'd had the same route for two years—left out of the apartment building, down past the corner shop, through the little cut-through beside the old church, and into the park where the trees were currently doing their autumnal thingy, shedding leaves in slow, dramatic spirals like they were performing for an audience.
You pulled the door shut behind you, checked your pockets by habit—keys, iPod, lip balm—and shoved your earbuds in, scrolling through your playlist with half your attention while you started down the path. The evening air had that particular bite to it, cold enough to sharpen your thoughts but not cold enough to be unpleasant. Somewhere behind you, a car alarm went off and then stopped.
The music kicked in just as you turned the corner, and you let yourself sink into it the way you always did, shoulders dropping, pace settling into something comfortable. The trees lining the path were beautiful tonight, amber and copper and a deep, burnt red that seemed to glow in the fading light.
The playlist was a good one. You'd been building it for weeks, and it had finally reached that level where every song led perfectly into the next. You were not paying attention. This, in hindsight, would turn out to be the first of many mistakes.
The pavement was there and then—without any reasonable explanation—it wasn't. There was no warning, no crack of thunder, no swelling of impossible light. One moment you were walking, music in your ears, thinking about whether you had enough milk for tomorrow's cup of tea. The next moment the ground simply ceased to cooperate.
Your foot came down on nothing and then you were falling—genuinely falling, not the brief embarrassing stumble of tripping on a kerb but a stomach-dropping plummet that lasted just long enough for you to think "oh shit" before the ground arrived.
You hit hard, a full-body collision with an uneven surface that drove the air from your lungs and sent you sliding several feet through a carpet of wet leaves. They were everywhere, sticking to your palms and your back and your trainers.
You lay there for a moment, completely still, your brain doing that slow systems-check that follows a significant impact.
"Oh— ow," you managed eloquently, pushing yourself up onto your elbows and blinking at the ground beneath you. Wet leaves. Dark, rich earth. The sharp, green-and-rot smell of deep woodland.
You pushed up further, getting yourself into a sitting position, and became aware of two things simultaneously, the sting of your palms, scraped and dirty, and a pulling sensation at your knee where your jeans had connected with something sharp.
You looked down. A neat, ugly tear in the denim, and a smear of blood showing through beneath.
"Ugh ...Brilliant."
Your earbuds were still in, one dangling loose now, and you pulled them both out, shoving them into your pocket. The music cut off mid-chorus. In its absence, the silence was—Enormous.
Not the city-park kind of silence, that comfortable urban quiet underscored by distant traffic and the far-off sound of someone's television. This was a silence with depth to it, layered and old, full of wind moving through leaves and the distant sound of birdsong you didn't recognise. You looked up slowly.
Trees. Tall, ancient-looking trees stretching in every direction, their canopies interlocking overhead in a lattice of amber and gold that filtered the remaining evening light into something dim and quiet. The path beneath you—if it could be called that—was narrow and unpaved, winding away in both directions through the undergrowth.
This was not the park.
Your iPod was on the ground beside you, face-down. You picked it up and turned it over. The screen had cracked right across the middle, a spiderweb of fractured glass splitting your wallpaper image cleanly in two.
"Oh, come on," you said to no one. "That was a birthday present."
You were still staring at it, trying to decide whether it was still functional, when the world caved in on top of you.
It happened all at once, something— someone— hit you from behind with the approximate weight and enthusiasm of a small, very determined boulder. Then another something hit from the side. Then two more in rapid succession, and suddenly you were flat on the ground again.
"—not the mushrooms!" someone wailed, in a voice of such genuine anguish that it might have been a eulogy.
"Excuse me!" you managed, from somewhere beneath the pile. "Off—could you get off, get off—please."
There was a scrambling untangling and a considerable amount of "sorry" and "beg your pardon" and one very heartfelt "Pippin," delivered in a tone that communicated prior history between the other parties involved. Weight lifted from your legs, your stomach, your shoulders, in stages. You got your elbows under you for a second time and pushed up into a sitting position.
Your knee was definitely bleeding now. Your palms felt like sandpaper. Your cracked iPod was somewhere in the leaves. And sitting around you in various states of dishevelment, surrounded by a scattered collection of vegetables, were four of the strangest-looking kids you'd ever seen in your life.
Except.
The more you looked at them, the less certain you were that they where kids. They were short— shorter than you, and you were not exactly towering—but there was something about them that wasn't childlike at all. They were looking back at you with expressions ranging from open-mouthed astonishment to cautious wariness to one in particular with a expression of delighted curiosity.
Then your eyes drifted down to the feet. Big, round, covered in dense curly hair, bare on the cold earth without seeming to notice the temperature.
You stared at the feet.
The feet's owners stared at you.
"...hello?" you tried.
"Hello!" said the delighted one immediately, grinning with the kind of uncomplicated warmth that makes you like someone before you've even learned their name. He had a cheerful face under a mop of sandy redish curls and looked like he found the whole thing tremendously exciting. He stuck out his hand. "I'm Pippin. Peregrin Took, properly, but nobody calls me that except when I'm in trouble. Which," he added, with cheerful honesty, "is fairly often."
"Right," you said, shaking his hand automatically. "Okay. Hi, Pippin."
"And I'm Merry." The one beside him was a little more composed but no less friendly, brown curls and an easy smile, already beginning to collect the scattered vegetables from the ground around you. "Meriadoc Brandybuck. Are you hurt? That was quite a collision."
"I'm—yeah, I'm fine, I think." You looked down at your knee again. "My jeans are ruined."
"Your—what?"
"My—" You gestured at your legs. "Never mind."
The other two hung slightly further back. One of them—stocky and square-jawed with a serious, earnest face—was watching you with an expression of cautious concern, like you might need help but he wasn't sure yet if you were trustworthy enough to offer it to. The last one stood a little apart from the rest, slender and dark-haired with a quality of quiet watchfulness that was different from the others. He was looking at you, then at the treeline around you, then back at you, as though running calculations.
"I'm Samwise," the serious-faced one said, giving a small, slightly awkward head bob that was almost a bow. "Samwise Gamgee. Are you— if you don't mind my asking— are you quite alright? You came down something awful hard there Miss."
"I'm fine, Samwise, thank you." You managed to get your feet under you, and Merry immediately moved to help you up, taking your arm with a practical competence that was oddly reassuring. You stood, brushed leaves from your jacket, and looked around again at the impossible forest. "Um. Can I ask you guys something?"
"Of course!" Pippin had found your iPod and was turning it over with intense, fascinated curiosity.
"Do any of you know how to get to Adelaide Court? It's—it's on the east side of town, near the Tesco, there's a grey building with a red door—"
Four blank faces.
Not the blank face of people trying to remember directions. The blank face of people hearing words that don't connect to any concept they possess.
"Adelaide Court ?," Merry repeated slowly.
"The... Tesco?" Pippin tried.
"It's a supermarket," you said, then stopped, because the blankness only deepened. "It's a shop. A large shop. With food in it?"
"We know what shops are," said the dark-haired one, speaking for the first time. His voice was quieter than the others, measured. "But I don't know any place by those names. I'm Frodo Baggins." A pause. "This is the East Road. Or it should be. We've come from Farmer Maggot's." He was studying you with that same quiet calculation. "Where have you come from?"
"From—" You gestured vaguely upward, or backward, or wherever your apartment had been. "From home. I was going for a walk. I tripped and then I was—here." You looked around again. The trees were real. The cold was real. The blood on your knee was real. "Where is here, exactly?"
"The Shire," Samwise said, with the tone of someone stating something so fundamental it barely required saying.
"The—" You blinked. "The what?"
More blankness, this time from their side. Four small faces looking up at you with expressions of increasing uncertainty. The Shire apparently needed no explanation, and the fact that it needed one now was clearly concerning.
"Right," you said, mostly to yourself. Your voice sounded steadier than you felt. "Okay. Um. I genuinely have no idea where I am, and I broke my iPod, my knee is bleeding, so." You exhaled. "I'm just going to—stand here for a second."
"Of course, Miss," Samwise said, with great earnestness. He was already holding out a handkerchief— an actual, fabric handkerchief, neatly folded. You took it, mostly out of surprise, and pressed it to your knee.
"Thanks Samwise."
"Think nothing of it, Miss."
Pippin had sidled up next to Merry and the two of them were exchanging a rapid, whispered conversation that you strongly suspected was about you. Frodo had moved a little way back up the path, looking at the road ahead with an expression that had shifted from watchful to something quieter and more private. You got the sense there was something happening here that went beyond four—short people?—tumbling into a stranger in the woods.
You didn't ask. You were too busy cataloguing the ways in which your situation was steadily becoming more alarming. No phone—The iPod was unusable. The forest around you bore no resemblance to anything you recognised. The people in front of you were unfamiliar with the idea of a freaking supermarket.
"So you guys are lost too?" you asked.
"Not exactly lost," Merry said, with the slight evasiveness of someone who isn't technically lying. "We know where the road is. We just need to get to the Bree before—"
"Before it gets dark?" you said, looking up at the dimming sky between the canopy. It was later than you'd realised. The light had that particular quality of impending evening, everything going golden and slow.
"Yes," Frodo said quietly from the path ahead. "Before it gets dark."
It was surprisingly easy to fall into step with them. That was the thing you kept noticing, in between noticing that none of this was possible and that your knee stung every time you bent it. The four of them had a quality of immediate, uncalculated welcome that you hadn't expected. Pippin talked constantly and cheerfully about everything and nothing, switching subjects with the associative logic of a pinball machine, and didn't seem to notice or care that you frequently had no idea what he was referring to. Merry would occasionally translate, or add context, or shoot Pippin a long-suffering look that communicated years of fond tolerance. Samwise walked near you with a slightly anxious protectiveness, and twice caught your elbow when a root threatened to send you down again.
Frodo was quieter. He walked slightly ahead, and you had the sense he was the leader ? Navigator of this small troop.
You were in the middle of trying to explain what a podcast was to Pippin—a sentence you had never expected to say— when you realised something had changed.
The birds had stopped, you didn't notice it at first, the way you don't notice a background noise until it disappears. But the wood had gone very still, and the quality of the light felt different, wrong, like something was pressing down on it from above.
Pippin had gone quiet mid-sentence. Even he felt it.
"Frodo—" Merry started.
"Off the road," Frodo said. His voice was low and urgent in a way that raised every hair on the back of your neck, and he was already moving toward the bank, where the roots of a large oak created a kind of natural hollow. "Now. Get off the road and hide."
You didn't ask questions. Something about the way he said it—the urgency, the fear underneath the control—moved you before your brain had finished processing the instruction. You scrambled after the others, sliding down the bank with way less grace than any of them, landing in a crouch behind the roots and pulling your jacket tighter as if that would help anything.
The sound arrived before the source, and it was the sound that frightened you first. Not a hoofbeat exactly— or not only a hoofbeat— but something layered underneath it, something that pressed against your ears in a way that had nothing to do with volume. It was the sound of a space where warmth wasn't. Of a presence that moved through the air like a wound.
You pressed yourself against the roots, shoulder to shoulder with Sam on one side and Pippin on the other, and you all held absolutely still.
A horse appeared on the road above. It was black. Not the natural, shifting black of a dark horse, but black the way shadows are black, black the way the absence of light is black. The thing riding it was—you couldn't look at it directly. Every time your eyes tried to settle on it, they slid away, like your brain had simply had enough and was refusing to process what it was seeing. A cloak. A hood. And beneath it, nothing you could properly see, but something you could feel, a cold that went past temperature into something older and more final.
It stopped.
Right above you. Right at the edge of the bank.
You stopped breathing. It wasn't a decision. Your body simply stopped.
The thing was—not twenty feet from where you were crouched—it stopped, and it inhaled. The sound of it traveled through the cold air with horrible intimacy, a slow, searching breath like something tasting what was in front of it. Sampling the night. Sampling the dark.
Pippin's hand found yours and gripped it so hard your knuckles ached. You gripped back. You were both staring straight ahead and neither of you were breathing and the hooded thing on the road turned its head—You thought with perfect, crystalline clarity.
"I am going to die here and I don't even know where here is."
And then, slow as it had come, it moved on. The hoofbeats receded. The smell—cold and deep and ancient and wrong, like something opened that had been sealed for centuries—drifted and thinned on the evening wind.
No one moved for a long time.
"Right," you said, when you had located your voice. It was somewhere in the region between a squeak and barely functional. "What—" You stopped. Tried again. "What in the actual fuck was that thing?"
"I don't know," Frodo said. He was standing now, and the steadiness he projected was clearly costing him something. "But we need to move. Quickly."
"I—I'm—Yep" you managed. "Yes—full agreement— absolutely do that."
The ferry was nothing like you expected, which was to say that it was a flat wooden raft with a rope and four determined short people hauling it across a dark river, and you stood in the middle of it with your arms slightly out for balance and your eyes on the far bank and tried to be useful, which after several attempts at being useful just required staying out of the way.
Pippin had recovered his good spirits with impressive speed. By the time you reached the far bank he was already talking about supper. Sam was quiet and thoughtful in the way that suggested he was worrying about several things simultaneously. Frodo looked like he was carrying some kind of invisible weight, and you kept glancing at him not sure if offering anything would help.
Merry appeared at your elbow. "Alright?" he asked, low enough that it was just for you.
"Not really," you said, with honesty, because there didn't seem to be much point in pretending. "But I'll keep up."
He nodded, and that was that. The landscape changed, the comfortable familiar fields giving way to roads that felt more traveled but less civilised, you walked through the night in stages, stopping twice to rest, and you had time to piece together—from Pippin's cheerful stream of information and Merry's more careful answers to your questions—the barest outline of where you were.
The Shire. The East Road. A place called Bree, where they apparently needed to meet someone there ?
You did not ask about the thing on the black horse. They didn't offer, and every fibre of your being was in favour of not revisiting whatever it actually was.
Bree appeared ahead of you eventually a cluster of lights behind a large gate in a wall that seemed designed by someone who had taken the concept of "keeping things out" very seriously. The Gatekeeper opened up for you with the resigned wariness of a man who had seen many strange people arrive at this gate at this hour and had made friends with very few of them.
You walked through into cobblestones and woodsmoke and the smell of something being cooked that made your stomach remind you aggressively that you hadn't eaten since lunch.
The inn was called the Prancing Pony. It was dimly lit, pleasantly loud, and thoroughly full of people minding their own business in the particular way that means they're definitely keeping an eye on things. The innkeeper—was a broad, friendly man with an air of mild overextension, like someone running three tasks simultaneously and fully committed to all of them.
The spot your strange group decided upon was warm, and close enough to a fireplace that it made you realise how cold you'd actually been.
You sat on a bench near the wall on instinct, you always liked to people watch—with a bowl of something thick and savoury in front of you that tasted better than it had any right to given the circumstances. The noise of the room was comfortable around you, voices, laughter, the clunk of pots, someone playing a pipe instrument in the corner.
You were watching Pippin at the bar with the focused attention of someone who hadnt realised they were identifying a problem in motion.
"What is he doing ?" you said.
"Ordering," Merry said, beside you, in the tone of someone who knows exactly what that means and has made his peace with it.
"Ordering what? Were already eating"
"Well, they have ale here" Merry tilted his head. "—in pints!"
You looked at Pippin. Pippin was cheerfully engaged in what appeared to be an extensive conversation with the barkeep, gesturing enthusiastically at what you strongly suspected were the ale barrels. You got up.
"Pippin."
"Hullo!" He turned with the expression of someone who has done nothing wrong and therefore has nothing to worry about. "Are you still hungry? They've got a wonderful selection—"
"Are you ordering a pint?"
"Well, they do several sizes," he began.
"That is not an answer to my question."
"It rather is, for a Took," Merry said from behind you, shit where did he come from.
You looked between them. Pippin was regarding you with bright, unconcerned eyes. "Listen," you said. "I don't know the rules here, I don't know the— customs, or the—I genuinely have no idea what's happening in my life right now. But." You pointed at the barrels. "Is ale really a good solution ?"
Pippin considered this.
"They have a cheese," he said. "And I believe there may be some cold meats, I'll eat and drink"
"Well thats...better," you sighed
"Wonder if they have mushrooms?" he added hopefully.
You sat back down. Leaving Pippin at the bar, and you watched him begin to cheerfully enumerate what appeared to be a four-course supper to the increasingly impressed barkeep.
"Does he always eat this much?" you asked Merry.
"More, usually," Merry said, with deep affection. "You should see him at the Elevensee's!"
Sam appeared with two more bowls, set one in front of Frodo's seat with a polite nod to you, and settled himself with a watchful quiet that you were beginning to recognise as his natural state. He was looking at the room the way Frodo had looked at the road— measuring it, taking inventory.
Time passed. The room was warm. You began to feel, cautiously, that perhaps you might survive this evening, which felt like progress. Frodo was somewhere in the crowd—you could see him near the bar, talking to Merry—
Then the singing started. Pippin, it turned out, was a gifted and enthusiastic performer who had not the slightest trace of self-consciousness. He was up on the bar— on the bar—with a pint in one hand and a crowd gathering. You were laughing despite yourself, watching him with his arms wide and his curls bouncing—
And then you looked for Frodo, and Frodo wasn't where he'd been. One moment Frodo was there, the next he wasn't, and the space where he'd been was just empty and a ripple of wrongness spreading from it. You were on your feet before you'd thought it through.
"Where's Frodo?" You asked, Merry was already scanning the room.
"He was just—" Sam started.
"Stairs." It was instinct, or something like it, or just the fact that the stairs were the only other place that someone could go. "Come on."
You grabbed the nearest available thing as you went, which happened to be the fireplace poker. It was iron and heavy and you didn't know what you were going to do with it, but your hands needed something and this was what was available. Behind you, in your peripheral vision, you saw Pippin descend from the bar and seize a chair—carrying it in a way that communicated he was absolutely prepared to throw it if necessary.
Sam was in front, which seemed right. Sam had the look of someone who would put himself in front of people without being asked and feel that it was the correct thing to do.
You were at the back, which also seemed right, because you were honestly terrified and the back of the group was where you naturally gravitated anyway.
The stairs creaked under your feet. The hallway above was narrow and low-ceilinged, lit by a single wall sconce that turned everything amber and shadow. Doors on either side, all closed. Sam was moving with his jaw set and his small, square hands in fists, and the rest of you kept pace with him, moving as a unit, the poker was in both your hands in a grip that was more 'please for the love of fuck don't let me need this' than any actual combat readiness.
The door at the end was slightly open.
Sam stopped. You all stopped.
From inside— voices. Frodo's, low and uncertain. And another voice, deeper, quiet in the way that very large, very contained things are quiet. You angled past Merry, who had moved to Sam's shoulder, and tried to see through the gap.
The room was small. Frodo stood near the middle of it. And in the corner, occupying rather more of the available space than seemed geometrically reasonable, was a man.
He was— tall. The word wasn't sufficient, but it was where you started. In the low-ceilinged room he seemed to take up the top half of the available air. Broad-shouldered, dressed in dark, worn travelling clothes, with long dark hair and the kind of face that had been weathered past ordinary handsomeness into something more complicated. His boots were crossed at the ankle, his arm resting on his knee. He was smoking a pipe.
He looked, from your angle, approximately the size and shape of a potential catastrophe, even seated he was simply large, large in the unshowy, structural way of something built rather than grown, and the low ceiling did him no favours.
The man's eyes moved to the door as it opened—to Merry, to Sam, to Pippin—and then past them, to where you stood at the back of the group, and they stopped.
You were used to not being the first thing people looked at in a room. You weren't that tall on a good day, quiet by nature, the sort of person who could stand at the back of a group and be comfortably overlooked because you where shorter or at least the height of everyone else in the group. This man looked at you with the same comprehensive attention he'd turned on the rest of the group, and his gaze moved, briefly but unmistakably, to the poker.
Something shifted in his expression. Very small. Very controlled. Gone almost immediately, back behind the even, watchful stillness of his face, but it had been there—some quality that was not quite amusement and was too restrained to be called anything so simple.
"I thought I heard small folk on the stair," he said, and his voice in the enclosed space was quiet and unhurried, and somehow harder to ignore than a loud one. "I was not expecting quite so many." His eyes returned to the chair in Pippin's hands and then back to your poker. "And I was not expecting ...furniture."
"It's a precaution," Pippin said without preamble.
The man looked at you for a moment. You had the sensation of being read—not unpleasantly, not with hostility, but with the thorough, impersonal attention of someone who had learned to assess strangers quickly because not doing so had consequences, before he addressed you all as a group.
"A reasonable one," he said. Simple. Flat. Meaning it.
You blinked. That was not what you'd been braced for. You kept the poker where it was anyway, because you'd carried it up all those stairs and you weren't ready to trust him yet.
"Who are you?" Merry said, stepping forward with the matter-of-fact boldness of someone who considered his height his own business and nobody else's.
"Strider." The name arrived like something worn smooth with use—but the name sounded like it sat on top of something else, which was either reassuring or its opposite. "I am a friend to Gandalf the Grey. And you are all in considerably more danger than you yet understand."
Summary : After pushing Legolas away, you finally succeed in creating the distance you thought you needed—only to realize too late. Piece by piece, his words, actions, and the quiet restraint in his gaze begin to form a truth you had misunderstood from the very start. Now, with your heart caught between panic and longing, you’re left questioning everything: was it too late to find him again, too late for apologies that should have been spoken sooner, or too late to undo the distance you created yourself?
A/n : I'm backk (again)! It's been a month-ish since my last update... still busy with work and piling amounts of work even though i'm just working part time T^T Been stuck in a writers block lately, been so burned out because of work but here I am! There's some unexpected lore drops, but don't worry i'm working on a blog for it! There's also no direct Legolas x reader scenes cause I wanted to create more distance lmao. Next few ones gonna be angsty sooo yea :) (Part of the f!reader is not from middle-earth series | Can be read as a one-shot as well!)
Wc : 10k
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Outside, the courtyard had become crowded with rows upon rows of Mirkwood elves clad in full battle armor, silver and green gleaming beneath the pale daylight.
They stood in perfect formation without a single line out of place, bows strapped neatly across their backs while long spears caught faintly beneath the cold northern light.
One by one, the people of Laketown slowly emerged from their shelters, exhaustion and caution written plainly across their faces as they stared at the sudden arrival of the elven army.
Quiet murmurs filled the streets. Children peeked from behind their mothers while several men instinctively tightened their grip around whatever tools or weapons they carried.
You stood beside Bard near the top of the wooden steps, arms folded loosely across yourself as your gaze swept over the overwhelming amount of elves filling the courtyard below.
"…Great," you muttered under your breath, nose scrunching slightly in immediate annoyance. "Now I have to deal with another elf."
Your tone remained low, laced heavily with mockery despite the fact you clearly intended nobody important to hear it. Unfortunately for you, Bard did.
He immediately nudged you sharply from the side with his elbow without even looking at you properly, the movement subtle but firm enough to make you stumble half a step.
"Would you stop speaking before you start another battle?" he muttered quietly through clenched teeth, not even bothering to hide the exhaustion in his voice anymore.
You looked mildly offended when he talked back. "In my defense," you whispered back while straightening again, "When I was gossiping with you, I specifically told you that I pushed away one ridiculously handsome elf that I have a crush on, and that I don't want to meet another elf, especially his father!"
Bard looked slightly confused by your choice of words, the two of you had grown close in these few hours, he enjoyed your company as much as you did with his.
"Gossiping-?" He muttered confusedly, before shaking the thought off. "Look kid, I get it, but we are in need of dire help." Bard's brows raised as he gave you a look, while you nodded slightly in return then.
"Yea... I know... whatever..." You mumured, as the two of you descended the steps together, several lines of elven soldiers shifted immediately, moving with smooth practiced precision as they stepped aside to form a clear pathway through the courtyard.
Not a single movement was wasted, not a single voice rose above the quiet rustling of armor and fabric. And then the sound of approaching hooves echoed through the streets.
The elves straightened almost instantly then. You lifted your gaze just as Thranduil rode forward upon his great elk, silver antlers towering high above the crowd as the beast moved gracefully through the parted lines of soldiers.
The Elvenking sat tall atop the creature, draped in silver and deep forest green, every inch of him carrying the same cold elegance that somehow made everyone nearby instinctively quieter.
The moment he approached, every elf turned toward him as one.
Bard stepped forward immediately beside you, posture straightening despite the tension visible in his shoulders. "My lord Thranduil," he greeted carefully, voice steady and respectful. "We did not expect to see you here."
Beside him, you tried very hard to look innocent, as if you hadn't quite literally sighed at his appearance. Unfortunately for you once more, Thranduil was an elf. Of course he had heard you earlier.
His pale eyes shifted toward you almost immediately, lingering for one brief second longer than necessary. There was no visible reaction upon his face, yet something knowing flickered quietly behind his gaze that made your entire expression tighten in suspicion.
Then, smoothly, he looked back toward Bard instead. "I heard your people required aid," Thranduil answered calmly, his voice carrying easily across the courtyard despite never rising.
As he spoke, another wagon rolled slowly forward behind him, wheels creaking against the frozen ground beneath the weight of supplies piled high within it—barrels of water, blankets, crates of bread, and medicine carefully packed beneath heavy coverings.
Around the courtyard, the atmosphere shifted almost immediately once the supplies were revealed. Relief spread visibly through the people of Laketown as smiles began appearing across tired faces for what felt like the first time in days.
Several townspeople stared openly now, disbelief slowly overtaking their fear. For a brief moment, the damaged town no longer felt quite so hopeless.
Murmurs quickly turned into grateful cheers while townsfolk hurried toward the wagons, exhaustion momentarily forgotten as they began unloading crates alongside the Mirkwood elves.
Children gathered excitedly around baskets of bread while several older villagers nearly looked ready to cry at the sight of blankets and fresh water being carried through the streets.
Even the elves themselves moved quietly amongst them without complaint, helping lift supplies from the wagons with calm efficiency despite the wary looks still occasionally thrown their way.
The same went towards you, your eyes lit up slowly at the sight of medicine. There were still many people you hadn't been able to heal since you've over exhausted yourself.
"Medicine!" You half gasped, glancing back at him immediately after that, brows lifting slightly despite yourself.
"That's alot..." you said then, before Bard gave you a look. It was true, you might've hated his arrival then, but this was exactly what they needed now.
Bard then let out a low cough, more as so to somewhat indicate you that you should probably take back what you've said earlier.
Letting out a low sigh, you shifted your gaze away from thranduil. "Geez...alright, thank you..." you mumured under your breath, not really wanting to voice it out loud either.
Though, the faint twitch near the corner of Thranduil's mouth suggested he had heard that too.
Beside you, Bard exhaled slowly then, some of the tension finally easing from his shoulders before he stepped forward toward Thranduil.
Gratitude was written plainly across his face now, genuine and unguarded in a way that felt rare for him. Meanwhile, you remained where you were with your arms folded across your chest, watching everything carefully beneath narrowed eyes.
"You have saved us," Bard said sincerely, his voice carrying clearly despite the noise surrounding the courtyard. "I do not know how to thank you."
Thranduil just remained seated atop his great elk, towering slightly above the crowd below. The cold winter light reflected against the silver detailing woven through his robes while the creature beneath him shifted calmly against the frost-covered ground.
For a second, the Elvenking simply looked at Bard in silence. Then his gaze drifted away, slowly and deliberately, until it landed on you instead.
"Your gratitude is misplaced," Thranduil replied at last, voice smooth and cool enough to quiet the nearby space almost immediately. "I did not come on behalf of your people."
Your brows furrowed faintly at the words as his pale eyes remained fixed upon you far longer than necessary. There was something unreadable hidden beneath his expression again, something restrained carefully behind the cold composure he carried so effortlessly.
"I came to reclaim something of mine," he continued evenly, as the words settled strangely in your chest.
His jaw tightened faintly afterward, like there had been something more he almost intended to say before deciding against it. But then, after the briefest pause, his expression shifted ever so slightly. Not softer exactly—but quieter, less distant.
"And to fulfill my promise." This time, his voice lowered just enough for the change to be noticeable.
Your eyes met his the moment he was finished speaking, and the look upon his face caught you entirely off guard.
Because for a moment, the cold king before everyone else disappeared beneath something far more human—something tired, almost gentle in a way that did not belong upon the Elvenking's face at all. It was exactly the same look you saw back at Mirkwood.
It still confuses you if you had to be honest. After all, you'd only met him that day.
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It was a mess. You stood alone there, breathing unevenly as the cold wind swept violently across the mountain ledge, yet you barely felt any of it.
Your thoughts were far too loud, replaying everything over and over until it made your chest ache. Thorin's words, and his expression, the way he had looked at you without truly looking at you at all.
"Be gone, ere arrows fly!" His voice still rang through your head even now, sharp that could sting, and final as it is.
You stared at the narrow opening within the stone wall where he had looked through only moments ago, disbelief still frozen across your face as though your mind refused to fully accept what had just happened.
You had watched him turn away from you without hesitation, his heavy footsteps disappearing back into the mountain while the small hole slowly sealed once more between you.
And somehow, that hurt. Your lips parted sharply as another breathless laugh of disbelief escaped you, your brows drawing together harder while anger surged violently through the shock settling inside your chest.
"Thorin Oakenshield!" you shouted suddenly, your voice echoing harshly against the stone cliffs around you. "You bastard!"
The wind nearly swallowed the words whole, but you shouted anyway, stepping forward toward the sealed gate as fury clouded every rational thought left inside your head.
"You coward!" Your hands curled tightly into fists at your sides, trembling from equal parts rage and frustration as you stared at the unmoving wall before you like sheer anger alone might force him to answer you.
"You made a promise!" Your voice cracked slightly beneath the force of it now, but you pushed through anyway, breathing growing uneven the longer you yelled. "A bargain, just like Bard said! You cannot simply hide inside your castle gate and pretend none of this matters anymore!"
Still nothing. No answer, no movement was given in return. Only silence, and somehow that silence infuriated you even more.
"You speak about that bastard elvenking like he's some selfish monster," you shouted again, voice roughening now beneath the strain, "but you are becoming exactly like him!"
The words left your mouth before you could stop them. Your chest rose sharply as you sucked in another breath, eyes burning fiercely while hurt and fury tangled so tightly together you could no longer separate one from the other.
"This is war we are talking about!" you continued, your voice echoing desperately across the mountain. It was all you could do, you were tired and frustrated after all. "People will die because of this, Thorin! Innocent people!"
Your throat began to ache now, the cold air biting harshly against every breath as exhaustion slowly started creeping through your body. Yet still you stood there waiting. Hoping for anything.
A response, or maybe even a shout back. Even anger would have been better than this crushing silence pressing against you from the other side of the gate. But the stone before you remained still, just like him.
Your brows pulled together harder then, desperation beginning to bleed through the anger now as your gaze remained fixed stubbornly upon the sealed stone gate.
There had to be someone inside willing to listen. Someone capable of talking sense into him before this spiraled beyond repair.
"Kíli!" you shouted suddenly, his name echoing sharply as your hope. "Fíli! Any of you, honestly!" You stepped forward again despite knowing it was pointless, frustration trembling through every movement now as your hands lifted helplessly toward the unmoving stone before dropping again at your sides.
"Could one of you please talk some sense into your stupid king?!" Your voice cracked slightly near the end, exhaustion and fury tangling together so violently it almost hurt to breathe through it.
"Bilbo?" you called next, quieter this time, almost grasping at the name desperately. "Come on... you have to understand..."
Nothing answered you except the cold mountain wind breezing through your disappointment.
Your chest tightened painfully. "Come on—!" you tried again, louder now, only for a strong hand to suddenly catch your arm before another forcefully pulled you backward away from the gate.
You stumbled slightly from the abrupt movement, spinning halfway around as Bard yanked you back toward him with enough force to finally break your focus entirely.
"What are you doing?!" you snapped immediately, frustration flashing across your face as you jerked your arm instinctively from his grasp.
Your breathing had become uneven now, quick and sharp from both anger and the cold biting into your lungs.
Bard held your gaze firmly despite it. "Enough." The single word came low and stern, yet there was something else hidden beneath it too, something tired, almost pleading.
Your expression twisted instantly, eyes burning fiercely as the emotions you had been holding back finally began cracking through properly now.
The cold wind stung against your face, catching faintly against the wetness beginning to gather along your lashline no matter how stubbornly you tried to force it away.
"No," you argued immediately, shaking your head as you glanced back toward the gate again like you still expected someone to answer. "No, he has to listen, Bard, he can't just-"
"They are not going to answer you." Bard's voice softened slightly this time, slower now, measured carefully as though trying not to push you harder than necessary. His grip loosened around your arm but never fully disappeared, steadying rather than restraining.
"He will not listen," Bard continued quietly, his eyes searching your face with visible concern now. "Not like this."
The words settled heavily between you both. You looked away sharply afterward, swallowing hard as your chest rose unevenly beneath another shaky breath. Because deep down, beneath all the anger and disbelief clawing through you—You knew he was right.
Your head was still spinning, everything felt too loud despite the cold silence hanging over the camp—the distant clanging of armor, hurried footsteps through snow, muffled voices discussing battle plans as though war had already become inevitable.
You hated it.
You hated all of it.
The screams. The blood. The smoke choking the air while people cried out for names that would never answer back. You hated the loss most of all, the empty feeling left afterward when the fighting stopped and all that remained were ghosts and regret.
And Thorin—Your jaw tightened painfully at the thought of him.
Thorin Oakenshield. You liar. You lying bastard.
You wrapped your arms tighter around yourself as you stood outside amongst the cold wind, trying desperately to quiet the storm inside your own mind before it swallowed you whole.
But the anger kept colliding violently against the hurt, and neither emotion seemed willing to fade first. Though, it was not long before another voice suddenly cut sharply through the chaos surrounding camp.
"This is the gateway to reclaiming the lands of Angmar in the North!"
Your head lifted immediately at the sound, that familiar tone. Just hearing it made your heart pound for an entirely different reason now.
"If that fallen kingdom should rise again, Rivendell, Lothlórien, the Shire, even Gondor itself will fall!" The voice continued to sound in your ears, as you begun picturing and piecing the pieces together.
The voice hit you instantly, your breath caught sharply as recognition slammed into you all at once.
Gandalf.
Without another thought, you turned immediately toward the nearby command tent, your feet already moving before your mind properly caught up. Snow crunched beneath your boots as you hurried forward, heartbeat quickening violently inside your chest.
You shoved the heavy tent flaps aside without hesitation, the cold air sweeping in behind you as your eyes landed upon the figures gathered within what looked moments away from becoming a full argument.
But you barely noticed any of them, because your gaze found him instantly.
Gandalf stood near the center of the tent, staff still clutched tightly within one hand while tension lined his tired features. His robes looked worn from travel and battle alike, streaked faintly with dirt and ash beneath the lanternlight. Yet he was standing, alive and breathing in front of your own eyes.
Relief hit you so hard it felt nice. For a horrifying moment after seeing that vision before, you had truly believed you would never see him again. Your visions had never lied before since you've noticed. Never.
And yet here he was.
"Gandalf!" Your voice broke slightly beneath the force of the relief rushing through you, running across the remaining distance without any hesitation.
Before the wizard could even properly react, you had already thrown yourself into him, arms wrapping tightly around his middle while your face buried straight into the heavy folds of his robes.
"You're alive!" You breathed out shakily, words muffled against him as emotion finally cracked through your voice entirely. "Oh my gosh—you're actually alive…"
For a second, Gandalf simply froze in surprise beneath the sudden force of you colliding into him, his staff nearly slipping from his grasp as he stumbled half a step backward.
His brows shot upward in surprise, clearly not expecting a human-shaped projectile to suddenly launch itself at him in the middle of a discussion.
Then he looked down. You were practically clinging to him, your face buried into the front of his robes while your hands gripped the fabric tightly as though letting go would somehow cause him to disappear again.
The panic and relief written so plainly across your expression made something in his face soften immediately.
A quiet breath escaped him. The sternness from moments ago melted away as his shoulders relaxed, and one weathered hand came to rest gently against your back.
There was amusement there, certainly, but beneath it sat something warmer—something almost fond as he looked down at you.
"Well," Gandalf murmured after a brief pause, the corners of his eyes crinkling slightly, "that is usually preferable, yes." The weak attempt at humor only made your eyes burn worse.
Staying in the same position, you barely had a moment to bask in the relief of finding Gandalf alive before a shrill, deeply irritating voice shattered the moment entirely.
"You!" The voice exclaimed loudly. "How dare you barge into the Master's tent just like that!"
Still half-buried within Gandalf's robes, you immediately scrunched your face in annoyance, eyes squeezing shut briefly as though physically pained by the sound alone.
The relief that had been flooding through your chest moments ago evaporated almost instantly, replaced by a familiar sense of exasperation.
Slowly, with all the enthusiasm of someone preparing to witness a disaster they had already predicted, you turned your head toward the source of the voice.
Of course, it was him.
Alfrid stood several feet away with his chest puffed out and his chin tilted upward as though he believed himself the most important person within the entire tent. The expression upon his face alone was enough to make your eye twitch.
Your stare flattened immediately. "What are you doing here?" you asked without hesitation, finally stepping away from Gandalf as you crossed your arms tightly across your chest.
Your tone carried no small amount of disbelief, as though his mere presence was somehow more shocking than everything else currently happening outside.
Alfrid looked utterly scandalized the moment it reached him. His mouth fell open before snapping shut again, releasing an exaggerated sigh through his nose then, folding his arms across himself in a poor imitation of authority.
"I am here with my sire," he announced proudly, drawing himself up even straighter. One hand lifted briefly to gesture toward Bard before returning to his side. "As his trusted right-hand man." The smugness in his voice was almost impressive. Almost.
You stared at him for a long moment before slowly glancing toward Bard, then back to Alfrid, then to Bard again. "…Right," you said at last, dragging it slowly in sarcasm.
Bard immediately looked away. His gaze drifted toward the opposite side of the tent with suspicious speed, one hand coming up to rub the back of his neck as though suddenly fascinated by literally anything else in the room. The faint tightening around his mouth suggested he was trying very hard not to comment.
That alone told you everything you needed to know.
"Oh please," you scoffed, rolling your eyes so hard it was a miracle they remained attached. "I'm fairly certain you're not his right-hand man. More like the unfortunate consequence of having a left hand available."
A faint choking sound immediately came from somewhere behind you. You didn't even need to turn around to know someone had nearly lost a battle against laughter.
From the corner of your eye, you caught Gandalf lowering his head slightly, one hand disappearing into his beard in what looked suspiciously like an attempt to hide his reaction.
Alfrid, meanwhile, looked personally betrayed by your existence. His face twisted in outrage as whatever composure he had been desperately clinging to completely abandoned him.
"You—!" he snapped, pointing a trembling finger directly at you while his eyes narrowed in offended disbelief. "How dare you insult me!"
"How dare I?" you repeated immediately, your eyebrows shooting upward as you tilted your head with exaggerated confusion. Folding your arms firmly across your chest, you stared at him as though he had just said something profoundly stupid. "You're the one who opened this conversation by yelling at me."
"You barged into this tent without so much as a greeting to the masters, you lowly commoner!" Alfrid continued loudly, stepping forward as his chest puffed out in indignation.
His hand sliced through the air as he gestured dramatically around the tent, as though trying to gather invisible support from the others present.
"Well that is hardly an excuse!" you shot back immediately, pushing yourself up slightly as your brows furrowed deeper and your tone sharpened. Your eyes flicked between him and the others, disbelief written clearly across your face as you gestured once in frustration.
"It is an excellent excuse!" Alfrid insisted, his voice rising even higher as the color in his face deepened with irritation. He straightened his posture further, trying to appear important as he turned slightly toward the others as if seeking more validation.
"The masters were discussing important matters!" he went on, waving his hand toward the group inside the tent. "Matters requiring intelligence, strategy, diplomacy—subjects a girl such as yourself would hardly understand!"
The moment those words left his mouth, the atmosphere changed, and you could feel the irritation vanish right then from your face.
Across the tent, Bard visibly froze. Gandalf's brows lifted so high they nearly disappeared beneath his hat, and then there was Thranduil.
The Elvenking had remained largely silent throughout the entire exchange, seated with the same effortless composure he seemed capable of maintaining through nearly any situation.
Not anymore. His head turned sharply toward Alfrid then, his pale eyes narrowed. The movement itself was small, yet somehow it felt more threatening than shouting ever could. The displeasure that settled across his features was subtle, but unmistakable.
Everyone knew that expression, and it never meant anything good. From that point on, Thranduil was ready to go all out on alfrid, no one should ever be brave enough to insult his goddaughter infront of him.
Unfortunately for Alfrid, he remained blissfully unaware.
"What?" you asked, voice deceptively calm as you tilted your head slightly, eyes narrowing just a fraction while you studied Alfrid's face with growing disbelief.
Your arms stayed loosely folded, but your posture shifted forward a little as if you were bracing yourself for whatever nonsense he was about to repeat. Alfrid blinked back at you, completely unbothered by your reaction and clearly clueless about the problem.
"You heard me," he said firmly, lifting his chin as though that alone validated everything he had just said.
"No, no. I heard you," you replied quickly, pointing straight at him with a slow, deliberate motion, your expression sharpening as your brows lifted higher in offence.
"I just wanted to make sure everybody else heard that too." Your gaze flicked briefly around the tent before snapping back to him, your face twisting into full disbelief now. "Are you being sexist right now?"
"What?" Alfrid asked this time, his expression shifting into exaggerated confusion as he took a small step back, clearly caught off guard by your sudden use of words.
"That's sexism," you stated flatly, arms crossing a little tighter as your shoulders squared, staring back at Alfrid without even a flicker of hesitation.
Alfrid immediately looked both offended and horrified at the same time, his mouth opening as though he'd been personally attacked by the concept of being wrong "I merely stated—" he began quickly, raising both hands defensively as his voice pitched higher in panic.
"You said my tiny little woman brain couldn't understand important matters like you guys do," you cut in instantly, leaning forward slightly as you spoke with sharp precision, your expression unchanging except for the clear irritation in your eyes.
"Because—"
"You're going to get cancelled," you declared confidently, nodding once as if that settled the matter completely. The words landed so seriously that several people in the tent visibly paused, exchanging uneasy glances despite clearly not understanding what you meant.
Alfrid blinked rapidly, his mouth opening and closing once. "…Cancelled?" he repeated slowly, his voice dropping slightly as confusion starts to replace his earlier outrage.
"Yes," you replied, nodding again with complete certainty.
"What does that mean?" Alfrid asked, now visibly unsettled, leaning back a fraction as his confidence finally started to crumble. His brows knitted together tightly, and his hands hovered awkwardly at his sides as though unsure whether to defend himself further or simply retreat.
"You wouldn't want to know anyways," you waved him off immediately, your hand slicing through the air with dismissive finality as if the topic itself was beneath any serious consideration. Your expression stayed firm and unimpressed, though there was a sharp edge of annoyance lingering in your tone as you looked away from him briefly.
"And you know what? Fine,"you added suddenly, throwing both hands up in exaggerated frustration before stepping back with dramatic flair, your shoulders rising as though the entire situation had personally offended you.
"Since apparently my lack of greetings has caused irreversible damage to diplomacy itself, I shall rectify this terrible mistake immediately."
A few heads turned as you strode toward the center of the tent, your movements deliberately theatrical, shoulders tensed as though you were preparing for some grand performance.
You stopped in the middle of the space, planting your feet firmly before placing one hand over your chest lazily, your chin lifting slightly as if addressing royalty of the highest order. The tent fell quiet in anticipation, several pairs of eyes following you with growing confusion.
"Greetings, wise and powerful leaders discussing wise and powerful things," you announced with absolute sincerity, your voice smooth but layered with obvious sarcasm as you held the pose a little longer than necessary. Straightening slowly, you added with a perfectly composed expression, "And meleth-nin, your highness."
The moment the words left your mouth, a strangled choking sound came from somewhere near the back of the tent again.
You, however, stood there with complete innocence, blinking once as if nothing unusual had just happened.
You glanced over, your eyes landing on Gandalf who looked back at you with wide eyes, shaking his head as if you'd said something wrong.
You had been expecting at least some kind of praise, or recognition at best. After all, you'd actually remembered the greeting correctly.
Legolas had tested you on this word before. So naturally, when the words left your mouth, you had expected something other than the strange silence that immediately followed. Instead, the entire tent had gone still.
Your smile faltered slightly, the confidence in your expression slipping just enough to show uncertainty as your brows knitted together. Your gaze flicked around the tent quickly, searching for any sign that someone might explain what had just gone wrong.
When your eyes landed on Gandalf, your confusion deepened.
He stood there with a very particular expression—something caught between disbelief, resignation, and the faintest hint of amusement he was clearly trying not to show. His beard shifted slightly as he pressed his lips together, as though choosing very carefully whether to speak or remain silent.
And Thranduil, your eyes then landed on the Elvenking. Immediately, you regretted it, as he was looking directly at you.
A small knot of uncertainty twisted inside your stomach. Had you pronounced or remembered something incorrectly? No, that couldn't be right.
You specifically remembered what Legolas had taught you. Every word. Every syllable. You'd repeated it enough times to nearly drive yourself insane then.
But the longer the silence stretched, the more uncomfortable you became. Finally, unable to bear it anymore, you shifted awkwardly beneath the weight of everyone's attention.
"Why are you guys staring at me like that?" you asked, a nervous laugh slipping into your voice as your eyes moved between them. "Did I say something wrong...?"
Your words slowly lost momentum as the silence stretched on longer than it should have. "...Guys?"
Thankfully to your rescue, a quiet cough finally broke the tension.
Your head immediately turned toward Gandalf. The wizard shifted slightly where he stood, one hand stroking thoughtfully through his beard while looking remarkably uncomfortable. It was the expression of a man who had been unwillingly volunteered to explain something unfortunate.
"Well..." he began carefully, exchanging a brief glance with Bard before looking back at you. "You have just confessed your love to the Elvenking, so I suppose perhaps."
The world seemed to stall in place the moment Gandalf finished speaking. Your expression went completely blank, as though your mind had simply refused to process what it had just heard. "What?" You stared at him, before a small disbelieving laugh broke free.
"What? Uh, no." Your head shook quickly, almost violently, as if you could physically erase the statement from reality. You lifted one hand and pointed at yourself in sheer confusion, brows pulling together as your eyes widened in protest. "No, I did not say that."
The silence that followed on was deeply concerning, your smile slowly vanishing with it. "...I didn't."
Gandalf looked almost sympathetic now, his expression softening in that cautious, carefully measured way he tended to use when delivering truths people were not going to enjoy hearing. One hand rested lightly on his staff, the other still absentmindedly stroking his beard as though it might help him choose kinder phrasing.
And somewhere to your right, you were fairly certain you saw the corner of Thranduil's mouth twitch.
Your eyes narrowed immediately. "Why does nobody look convinced?" you demanded, your voice sharpening as you shifted your weight slightly forward, gaze sweeping the room in quick, suspicious passes.
"Oh, but you did," Gandalf replied without missing a beat, giving a small nod as one hand stroked thoughtfully through his beard while he watched your reaction unfold. "My ears do not deceive me."
"No, no..." A nervous laugh escaped you immediately as you shook your head once more, refusing the possibility outright.
Your hands lifted slightly in protest before falling again. "That can't be right." You glanced between the faces around the tent, searching desperately for someone to contradict him. "Legolas specifically told me it was some kind of greeting. I remember it perfectly, alright? My memory isn't that bad."
The moment the words left your mouth, the atmosphere inside the tent seemed to shift. Your smile faltered slightly as your gaze moved between the gathered faces, searching for someone, well anyone—to back you up. Though like usual, it seemed you have truly been the one to use it wrongly.
Your smile slowly began to fade then. Slowly, your gaze drifted back toward Gandalf, then to Bard, and finally around the rest of the tent. Nobody looked confused. Nobody looked surprised. If anything, they looked uncomfortable.
That was when realization hit you all at once. "...Oh."
Your face immediately went blank right there and then. Deadpan, you turned your head away and stared at the nearest tent wall, one hand immediately rising to cover part of your face as embarrassment washed over you in a slow, horrifying wave.
"It means I love you, doesn't it." The words came out flat, almost defeated. You already knew the answer before anyone could give it. The silence that followed only confirmed it even more.
You bit down lightly on your lower lip, eyes squeezing shut for a brief moment as the memory replayed itself with devastating clarity. That conversation between the two of you. And all this time—
"He lied," you muttered beneath your breath, staring at the ground now. Your brows furrowed as a dozen thoughts immediately began colliding inside your head. "That idiot actually lied to me."
But just as soon, another thought followed right after, a much more dangerous one.
Your expression slowly shifted from embarrassment to confusion as you replayed the memory again. The way he'd looked at you when he'd said it. The ease with which the words had left him, and the complete lack of hesitation. You weren't entirely an idiot to know after all.
That was when your entire train of thought abruptly crashed into a wall. A faint warmth immediately rushed into your face, painting it slightly flushed. "...Wait."
Your head lifted slowly as you spoke, turning toward Gandalf the next second.
"...Did Legolas confess to me?"
The question slipped out before you could stop it. The moment it did, several expressions around the tent changed at once—and suddenly, you weren't sure you wanted the answer anymore.
Because now that it had been said aloud, it somehow sounded far more real than it had inside your head. And judging by the expressions around the tent, you weren't the only one considering the possibility.
"Legolas... said that?" The question cut cleanly through the tent, drawing your attention back toward Thranduil immediately.
The Elvenking's brows had pulled together faintly, his pale gaze fixed entirely on you as though trying to determine whether he'd heard correctly.
You opened your mouth, only to find yourself suddenly very aware of every pair of eyes in the tent. "...Maybe?" you answered weakly.
The silence that followed was unbearable since then. And, that conversation still continued to haunt you long after you'd escaped the tent.
Now, standing outside once more beneath the grey skies of the encampment, your thoughts refused to leave you alone. Between Thorin's betrayal, the looming threat of war, and whatever that conversation had been, your mind felt like a tangled mess of frustration and unanswered questions.
With an annoyed huff, you kicked a loose stone across the ground. Your shoulders slumped as you shoved your hands into your pockets, gaze dropping briefly toward the dirt beneath your feet.
Around you, the camp buzzed with quiet activity. Soldiers moved between tents, weapons gleamed beneath the fading sunlight.
A short distance away sat a small circle of elves gathered around what appeared to be their evening meal. Some were talking amongst themselves while others simply enjoyed the rare moment of peace between preparations.
Your gaze lingered on them for a moment, before an idea appeared in your mind. A grin slowly tugged at the corners of your mouth as your frustration began giving way to something far more beneficial.
Whatever had been bothering you moments ago suddenly seemed less important now that a certain thought had entered your head.
Without even realizing it, your feet had already started moving. The smile on your face widened slightly as you made your way toward them.
Your hands remained tucked behind your back as you approached, rocking slightly on your heels before dropping down beside them without the slightest invitation.
A few of the elves noticed your approach immediately., and that only made your grin grow wider. Before anyone could question your intentions, you casually dropped down beside the nearest group as though you belonged there.
"Hello." The greeting came far too cheerfully, as several elves immediately looked suspicious.
You settled yourself amongst them without the slightest hint of hesitation, crossing your legs comfortably as though you'd been invited there all along.
A bright smile remained fixed on your face while several of the elves exchanged wary glances with one another, their conversation having completely died the moment you arrived. One even straightened slightly, as though preparing himself for something.
"Soooooo..." you began, dragging the word out slightly as your gaze swept around the circle. "Long time no see." You gestured vaguely between yourself and them before pointing toward a few familiar faces.
"Last time I saw you all was in the dungeon basement. Or... well, the castle." A sheepish grin tugged at your lips. "Honestly, not exactly the friendliest reunion location."
And to your suprise, the response was not what you'd expected. Sure playing the friendly route usually works out, but this was different.
A few elves looked away immediately, as one focused intensely on his food while another suddenly found the trees behind you just fascinating in some way. The awkward silence that followed stretched just long enough for your smile to falter slightly.
Your brows furrowed as your gaze moved between them. You had expected suspicion, maybe a few strange looks, but this felt different.
It wasn't hostility exactly. If anything, it looked more like they were waiting for something unfortunate to happen.
Still, just like how you'd normally react, you pushed the thought aside.
"Well anyways," you continued brightly, clasping your hands together in front of you. "I was hoping you guys could teach me some Elvish." Your eyes lit up slightly at the idea as you leaned forward. "Legolas taught me a few phrases already, so I know the basics alrea—"
"You're not going to make us drink anything, are you?" The interruption caught you completely off guard.
The elf who had spoken lowered his cup slowly, his expression cautious as he looked you up and down. "Or make us play those strange games again?" he added, narrowing his eyes slightly. "Or sing one of those songs?"
Several elves immediately nodded in unison, while you stared back blankly, absolutely confused by this whole thing.
"Especially the songs," another muttered under his breath, grimacing faintly as though reliving a painful memory.
Your mouth slowly fell open as you stared at them in complete disbelief. "What?" you said, blinking rapidly as your gaze darted around the circle, searching their faces for any sign that they were joking.
"Okay, wait. First of all, I don't drink." You pointed at yourself firmly, brows raised high as though the very accusation had offended you. "In fact, I'm not even of age to drink yet, so I wouldn't."
The reaction was immediate, as several elves visibly relaxed where they sat. One lowered his shoulders with a quiet exhale while another exchanged a relieved glance with the elf beside him. The tension that had been lingering around the group seemed to ease all at once.
You stared at them, utterly baffled. "What kind of reputation has Legolas given me?" you asked slowly, narrowing your eyes suspiciously as you folded your arms across your chest. "Why are you all acting like I poison people for fun?"
Several elves suddenly found their food incredibly fascinating for some reason. One lowered his gaze straight into his bowl as though the answer to all of life's mysteries had somehow appeared inside it, while another took an unusually long drink from his cup to avoid speaking.
Beside him, an elf cleared his throat awkwardly into his fist before quickly looking away the moment your eyes landed on him.
Your suspicion immediately doubled the moment it happened. Slowly, you narrowed your eyes at the entire group, arms folding tighter across your chest as your gaze swept from one guilty face to another.
"...What did he tell you?" you asked carefully, leaning forward slightly as though trying to catch someone before they escaped. The moment the question left your mouth, several shoulders visibly stiffened.
The silence that followed along was deeply concerning as well. Who knows what he could've said. Your reputation was at line here.
You waited, whereas nobody answered. One opened his mouth as though considering a response before immediately deciding against it and looking somewhere over your shoulder instead.
"Oh come on...What did he say?" you asked again, pointing accusingly toward them as though they were personally responsible.
One of the elves finally sighed then, setting down his cup as though accepting a burden nobody else wished to carry. "Legolas told us nothing about you," he said carefully, choosing each word with suspicious precision while refusing to meet your eyes directly.
His expression remained perfectly neutral, though the faint twitch near the corner of his mouth told you he was absolutely hiding something. "Now, if you truly wish to learn, I suggest we begin."
Your jaw dropped. "What—?" You stared at him in disbelief before immediately pointing an accusing finger in his direction. "Are you changing the subject right now?" Your brows shot upward as you leaned forward, scandalized by the sheer audacity of it.
The elf merely lifted a brow, the interruption deliberate. "Ahem." Tilting his head ever so slightly, he regarded you with the patient expression of a teacher waiting for a particularly troublesome student to stop talking.
You narrowed your eyes at them, while the group collectively pretended innocence. For a long moment, you simply sat there glaring at them, your arms folded tightly across your chest.
"...Fine," you muttered at last, gritting your teeth as you pointed between them with reluctant acceptance. "But just so we're clear, this conversation is not over." Your eyes narrowed further as you looked around the circle one last time. "I'm coming back to this later."
Several elves visibly relaxed at your reluctant agreement. One even let out a quiet breath of relief, shoulders lowering as though he had narrowly escaped some terrible fate. Unfortunately for them, you noticed immediately.
"Oh, that's suspicious," you said slowly, one brow arching higher than the other, looking at their far too pleased expression. "That is an extremely suspicious amount of relief for people who supposedly have nothing to hide."
The elf seated beside you cleared his throat politely, though the faint amusement tugging at the corner of his mouth betrayed him. "The word for suspicious is Finna," he informed you calmly, inclining his head slightly as though he were genuinely conducting a lesson. Not a single trace of guilt appeared on his face.
"...Did you seriously just turn my accusation into a vocabulary lesson?" you asked slowly, staring at him in complete disbelief, as your expression flattened further with every second that passed.
"Yes," the elf answered immediately, not even hesitating, while several others nodded in agreement. One even murmured, "A very useful word to know."
You stared at them for a long moment, mouth opening slightly before closing again as you searched for a response. Then, with a groan full of defeat and disbelief, you dropped your face into your hands and dragged them slowly down your face.
Somehow, despite sitting amongst dozens of different elves, they had all managed to develop the exact same infuriating habit.
Thankfully, once they truly realized you were neither carrying alcohol nor planning to force them into another bizarre activity, the atmosphere became significantly less tense. The elves slowly returned to their meals and conversations, though now they actually answered when you spoke instead of looking for escape routes.
To your surprise, they were helpful.
Very helpful.
Every question you asked was met with an answer. Every mispronounced word was corrected patiently, sometimes by three different elves at once. Before long, you found yourself repeating phrases after them while they tried, and occasionally failed not to laugh at your accent.
Honestly, you weren't entirely sure why it was going so much better than your lessons with Legolas.
Maybe it was because there were more people to ask. Maybe it was because you weren't constantly being distracted, or maybe it was because you simply didn't care how ridiculous you sounded.
Whatever the reason, you found yourself relaxing for the first time all day. The weight of war, Thorin's betrayal, and the endless questions crowding your mind faded slightly into the background as laughter and conversation slowly replaced them.
For a little while, you almost forgot there was a battle waiting for all of you tomorrow.
"I beg your pardon for the suddenness of my inquiry, but may I ask…" one elf said after a brief pause, leaning forward slightly as his gaze flicked toward you with cautious curiosity.
His fingers hovered over his bowl before settling again, as though he wasn’t entirely sure if speaking to you would cause trouble. "That braid… did you do it yourself? That's some fine work."
You lifted your head from where you had been idly tracing patterns into the sand, brushing a few grains off your fingers before straightening slightly.
"Oh, this?" you asked, pointing up toward your hair as your braid shifted faintly with the movement. A small, cheeky smile spread across your face as you tilted your head, clearly a little proud. "I didn't do it. Legolas was the one who helped me with it."
Just as you spoke, one elf who had been drinking water choked mid-sip, coughing sharply as he quickly set his cup down while another froze completely, eyes widening in clear disbelief.
A few others turned their heads toward you at once, expressions shifting into something between shock and cautious confusion, as though trying to confirm they had heard you correctly.
Your smile faltered slightly at their sudden reactions. Slowly, your brows drew together as you looked around at them, feeling the shift in atmosphere all over again.
"What?" you asked, leaning back slightly on your hands. Your eyes narrowed as you glanced between their faces, irritation creeping in as the silence stretched just a second too long. "It's not my fault I don't know how to tie braids like y'all do."
You huffed, rolling your eyes with clear annoyance while your fingers absentmindedly tugged at the end of the braid. "Why are you all acting like I just said something wrong?" you muttered, leaning slightly to the side as your gaze flicked from one elf to another.
Around you, the others exchanged wary glances, suddenly looking unsure of how to react to you again, as though reassessing every interaction they had just had.
"No no… it's not that…" one elf quickly interjected, lifting both hands slightly as if to calm the sudden shift in tension. His expression softened awkwardly, though his eyes kept flicking between you and the others for reassurance.
He cleared his throat, trying to sound casual despite the obvious hesitation creeping into his voice. "You don't know, do you?"
You blinked at him slowly, your earlier irritation fading into confusion as you tilted your head slightly. "What do I not know?" you asked, brows knitting together as you studied his face carefully.
Your fingers paused where they had been idly tugging at the end of your braid, your expression turning blank in genuine cluelessness.
The elf hesitated again, visibly uncomfortable now, his gaze dropping briefly before he glanced toward the others for help. When none of them stepped in, he exhaled quietly through his nose and straightened slightly, as though forcing himself to continue.
"Well…" he began slowly, voice lowering a fraction as his ears turned faintly red. "Usually, helping someone tie their braids is… not something done lightly."
Your brows furrowed deeper.
"It is…" the elf hesitated, choosing his words with visible care as his gaze briefly dropped toward the ground. His fingers tightened slightly around the edge of his cloak before he continued, his voice lowering as though speaking of something deeply personal. "A rather intimate gesture among our kind."
He glanced at the other elves for a moment, only to find none of them willing to rescue him from the explanation.
"In Mirkwood," he continued carefully, "the braiding of another's hair is not a thing done lightly. Such a privilege is usually reserved for those bound by close familial ties—parents, siblings, children." His expression grew increasingly uncomfortable the further he spoke, already anticipating your reaction.
"And…" he paused, clearing his throat softly before forcing himself onward. "Those who have chosen one another." His eyes flickered briefly toward your braid before returning to your face. "A husband and wife. Or those whose bond is regarded with equal affection and trust."
The elf shifted slightly where he sat, clearly uncomfortable trying to explain what it had meant.
"To place one's hands in another's hair is considered an act of great familiarity among our people," he added more quietly. "It is a gesture of care. Of trust." A small pause followed before he finished with a faint wince, "It is not something most elves would offer casually."
A short laugh escaped you almost immediately, light and disbelieving as you shook your head slightly. "No, that can't be right," you said with a dismissive wave of your hand, lips still curled faintly in amusement as if the idea itself was absurd. "It's just hair. He was just helping me out—there's nothing… intimate about that."
But even as you said it, your voice began to lose its certainty. Your smile faltered a little as your eyes drifted away from them, thoughts slowly pulling backward through every moment you could remember.
The way Legolas got slightly flustered when you'd agreed to his help, and the careful focus in his expression as his fingers worked through each strand, taking far longer than someone simply 'helping' should have.
And afterward… the silence. The way he'd lingered behind you for a moment without saying anything, as though caught in a thought he hadn't meant to have. Slowly, your brows drew together as something uncomfortable began settling in your chest.
It wasn't long before Tauriel's expression flickered into your mind. The brief pause she had given when you'd ask for help. The way her eyes had shifted between you and the prince without a word, as though she had already understood something you hadn't.
Your fingers slowly lifted to touch the braid again, this time more cautiously, as the earlier confidence drained out of your expression. "…No way," you muttered quietly, the words barely leaving your lips as realization began creeping in piece by piece.
Across the circle, one of the elves tilted his head slightly, studying your expression for a moment before finally speaking. "Are you two bound by courtship?" he asked carefully, his tone more curious than intrusive as one brow lifted ever so slightly.
Around him, a few of the others glanced in your direction as well, their movements subtle but unmistakable as quiet anticipation settled over the group.
You didn't respond, not because you didn't hear him, but because your mind had already drifted too far away to register the question properly.
Your gaze remained lowered, fixed on the braid resting over your shoulder as your thoughts replayed every detail again and again, slower this time, as though trying to find where you had misunderstood everything.
Your lips parted slightly as you stared at the braid, eyes unfocused now as though you were seeing something far beyond the camp itself. Every detail returned slower this time, clearer, stripped of the assumptions you had hidden behind before.
Your thumb traced absentmindedly across the braid as realization continued settling deeper into your chest, each remembered moment fitting together with uncomfortable clarity. Somewhere nearby, someone shifted, but the sound barely registered.
You were too busy wondering how many signs had been right in front of you. And how you had somehow missed every single one.
The question hung in the air, but it barely reached you at all. You remained still, eyes lowered, fingers lightly gripping the edge of your braid as your thoughts continued to spiral inward.
The voices around you gradually blurred into meaningless noise the longer you sat there, as though the distance between you and the circle had quietly stretched without anyone moving.
Every word spoken seemed to reach your ears a moment too late, drowned beneath the storm of thoughts crowding your mind. Your gaze remained fixed on the ground, unfocused, while your fingers tightened unconsciously around the fabric resting in your lap.
"…Excuse me," you said suddenly, your voice much quieter than before as you pushed yourself to your feet. The movement felt oddly unsteady, almost absent-minded, as though your body had decided to move before your thoughts had fully caught up.
You brushed your hands against your clothes out of habit, avoiding everyone's eyes as you lowered your gaze briefly toward the ground. No explanation followed. No awkward excuse. Just a small nod before you turned away from the circle entirely.
Behind you, a few elves exchanged uncertain looks. You didn't notice, or perhaps you simply didn't care enough to.
Your steps were slow at first as you moved through the encampment, weaving absent-mindedly between tents and campfires while a strange heaviness settled deeper inside your chest.
Your breath had begun shortening without reason, each inhale feeling slightly more difficult than the last, while your fingers curled and uncurl at your sides in restless frustration.
The memories refused to stop replaying—the braid, his hands, the careful silence between you, Tauriel's expression, the looks everyone had given you. Each memory pressed a little harder than the last until it felt impossible to ignore.
Legolas.
The thought struck sharper this time, like something had finally broken through the noise in your mind. Your pace changed before you even consciously registered it, your steps quickening as your boots pressed harder into the uneven ground.
Your gaze snapped up, scanning between tents and moving figures with growing urgency, as though he might suddenly appear the moment you needed him to.
Your breathing began to turn uneven by the second, each inhale catching slightly as frustration and panic tangled together in your chest without any clear separation. and still your mind kept circling back to the same realization, refusing to let go.
Legolas. And the possibility that you had misunderstood everything.
Before you fully realized what your body was doing, you were running. Your footsteps hit the ground faster now, dirt shifting beneath you as you pushed through the camp, passing between tents and startled elves who turned too late to react.
Voices called out behind you, confused and questioning, but none of it registered enough to slow you down or pull your attention away.
Your eyes moved desperately from face to face, from path to path, searching for that familiar face you pushed away. The encampment suddenly felt too large, too crowded, too full of places he wasn't. It didn't make sense.
You felt foolish now, embarrassingly so, like you had missed something obvious that everyone else had already understood, and all you could think about was finding him.
Finding Legolas, and apologising.
Your steps refused to slow even as your vision began to blur faintly at the edges, the world around you smearing slightly with every hurried breath.
A tight pressure built in your chest, heavy and suffocating, like something was slowly closing in that you couldn't quite push away no matter how hard you tried. Your shoulders remained tensed as you ran, fingers curling tightly before releasing again in restless rhythm.
The longer you moved, the more everything inside you twisted into something heavier and harder to carry—regret, confusion, and then that sinking, unmistakable feeling that you had misunderstood everything from the very beginning.
A sharp hitch broke through your breath as you continued running. You blinked quickly, almost aggressively, trying to force away the sting gathering at the corners of your eyes before it could fall.
Your gaze stayed fixed ahead, refusing to stop, refusing to slow, even as your mind kept repeating the same thought over and over again.
Legolas, again.
That name alone made your pace falter for a fraction of a second, your foot hesitating mid-step before you forced yourself forward once more, as if stopping would mean accepting something you weren’t ready to face.
Behind you, hurried footsteps approached, and before you could fully react, a hand reached out carefully but firmly to catch your arm. You stumbled slightly as your momentum broke, shoulders jerking as you were forced to stop, chest rising unevenly while your breath came in shallow pulls.
You turned quickly, and found Bard standing there, one hand still holding your arm lightly, his brow furrowed deeply and his expression carved with concern as he studied your face in silence.
His grip loosened immediately once he had your attention, as if realizing you were on the edge of something he didn't fully understand.
"Hey—are you alright?" Bard asked, his voice lower now, steady but clearly worried as he studied your face. His eyes flicked over your expression, your breathing, the way your gaze kept darting past him instead of focusing. You barely registered his question properly, your thoughts still locked on one thing, one person.
Your lips parted before you even thought it through. "Where is he?" you asked quickly with an uneven voice, almost breathless as your hands curled slightly at your sides. "Where did Legolas go?"
Bard hesitated for a moment, his expression shifting in a way that immediately made your stomach drop. He glanced away briefly, jaw tightening as if weighing how to say it. Then he looked back at you, more gently this time, though it didn't soften the impact of his words.
"He left," he said simply, careful but final. "A while ago."
Bard's answer landed quietly, but it hit you like something much louder. The words settled in your chest for a second before everything inside you seemed to collapse at once, your breath catching sharply as your eyes stung instantly.
You turned your head away quickly, jaw tightening as you tried to swallow down the rising pressure, but it was already too late—your vision blurred at the edges, and your lashes trembled as you blinked rapidly.
Legolas had left. Just like that.
A curse slipped under your breath, broken and frustrated, lifting a hand quickly to your face as if that could somehow stop it. Bard noticed immediately, his expression shifting from concern to something deeper as he stepped closer again, his voice softer now as he carefully asked what was wrong.
You shook your head at first, refusing to look at him, shoulders tense as you fought to steady your breathing.
"I've messed things up again," you said finally, voice cracking halfway through as your eyes turned red from holding everything back. Your hands curled into the fabric of your sleeves, gripping tightly as though anchoring yourself in place.
"I always do… I—it's like—gosh I can't do anything right—" Your words broke off completely as your throat tightened, and you let out a shaky breath that turned into something closer to a sob you couldn't hold back.
Bard didn't interrupt you again this time. Instead, he stepped forward and pulled you into his arms. The sudden warmth made everything snap all at once. Whatever restraint you had left crumbled immediately as you buried your face into his shoulder, clutching onto his clothes while your breath shook unevenly.
Bard held you steady without hesitation, one hand resting firmly on your back as you finally let yourself cry.
And as those tears fall, all you could think of was an apology. A single thought, repeating itself over and over, louder than everything else.
You were sorry.
Sorry for letting him go. Sorry for pushing him away over something you had seen but never truly understood.
The guilt sat heavy in your chest, sharp and suffocating, twisting every memory of him into something softer, something you suddenly realized you had taken for granted.
Anger followed right after it. Not at him, but at yourself. At how quickly you had turned away. At how easily you had believed fear over him. At how one vision—just one had been enough to make you step back from something you never properly questioned until it was already slipping away.
꒰ summary: “Three paces,” he mumbles against your skin, shaking his head slightly as if trying to clear a fog. “Every morning on the terrace. Every patrol. You walk behind me. Always…always behind me. Never beside me. I have spent a lifetime staring at the slant of your shoulder, wondering…absolute madness…wondering why I was not allowed to turn around.” For seventy years, military duty kept you safely frozen in his shadow. But tonight, the Dorwinion wine runs freely, the steam is scalding, and Legolas is absolutely through with the distance. ꒱
꒰ a/n: if you are wondering yes this is inspired by THAT scene in pursuit of jade ꒱
ᯓ★ read on ao3 or below the cut
The heavy oak deadbolt slides into place with a metallic thud, locking the roaring chaos of the Midsummer Feast on the other side. In the echoing quiet of Legolas’ private chambers, the air is already thick with the humid steam of the sunken marble bath – drawn hours ago by the palace staff and kept scalding by the hearth hidden beneath the carved floor.
You do not lose a second. You turn to the attendants adjusting the linen towels by the basin.
“Leave us,” you command, your voice carrying the crisp authority of a lieutenant. “The Prince requires no further assistance tonight. Clear the chambers by the rear stairwell.”
The servants bow quickly, keeping their eyes lowered. They slip out through the side corridor before they could look too closely at the heir of their realm, who leans his shoulder heavily against a carved stone pillar, his eyes glassy and dark.
Once the tapestry settles behind them, you stride to the edge of the steaming bath, grab a handful of dried, crushed mint and winter-bark from a silver vanity and toss it into the water. The water hisses, the sharp scent of the woods blooming in the air, cutting through the cloyingly sweet stench of Dorwinion grapes clinging to his skin.
A frustrated grunt echoes from the stone pillar.
You look back. Legolas curses under his breath in fragmented Sindarin, his usually lithe fingers tugging blindly at the reinforced bracer on his left forearm. He succeeds in only tightening the knot, his jaw clenching in irritation at his own sluggish movements. He yanks at it again, his heavy riding boots dragging on the rug as he sways. He glares down at them, and kicks them off his feet, swaying backwards dangerously.
“Legolas, stop,” you murmur, stepping away from the bath and crossing the stone floor into his space. “You are only making it worse. Let me.”
“The laces are… knotted,” he rasps. He does not yield the arm immediately, stubbornly trying to force the leather over his hand. “The eyelets will not align. The room keeps shifting.”
“The room is perfectly still,” you say, catching his wrists to force his fumbling hands away from the leather. “It is your head that is spinning. Stand straight.”
The moment your fingers clamp onto his wrist, the radiating heat of his body hits you like a wall. Legolas stops fighting the leather. His hands go slack, and his dark, dilated gaze snaps down to focus on your face.
You drop your eyes to his forearm, deliberately avoiding his stare. Your fingers work the stubborn leather laces of his bracers, untangling the knot with the practiced efficiency of seventy years of duty.
“You drank half the private stores of Dorwinion,” you mutter, your voice hushed but frantic as you strip away the first leather guard, letting it fall to the floor. “If your father had looked to the right during the toast — if he had seen the way you were holding your chalice—”
“He was looking at the lords of Mithlond,” Legolas interrupts softly. He did not sound like a prince right now, but as someone dazed and dangerously unbothered. “He did not see me. No one saw me.”
“I saw you,” you snap, your fingers moving to the silver buckles of his doublet, your knuckles inadvertently brushing against the linen of his shirt underneath. “The entire vanguard line saw you. You were staring across the hall like a madman.”
“I was looking at my shadow,” he murmurs.
Your fingers falter on the second buckle. You keep your eyes trained rigidly on his collar, your heart hitting a sudden and erratic thud against your ribs. “Do not talk nonsense, Commander. Undo your shoulder guards.”
“I cannot,” he whispers, and there is a strange trace of a laugh in his chest. He does not lift his arms to help. Instead, before you can step back, his large hands come down, his palms anchoring firmly onto the sides of your waist. “I told you. The floor is moving like river-boats. If I let go of you, I will fall.”
Your breath hitches, your spine freezing as his thumbs press through the stiff fabric of your uniform, holding you flush in his space.
“Legolas, remove your hands,” you whisper, the strict military mask faltering, revealing the desperate panic underneath. “We are in your chambers, but I am still on duty. Let go.”
He leans down, his face dropping into the crook of your neck, his wine-sweet breath fanning across your collarbone as he lets out a heavy sigh.
“The deadbolt is thick,” he slurs against your skin, his grip tightening on your waist until it is almost bruising. “The uniform is off…the court is gone. Let me hold you until the room stops spinning.”
The warmth of his breath against your neck sends a traitorous shiver straight down your spine. For a second, your hands hover uselessly over the remaining silver buckles of his doublet, your knuckles trembling against his chest. The scent of the mint and winter-bark steam envelops you both like a shroud, your skin tingling in the mist. You tug at the buckles once more, and the shoulder guards and doublet tumble onto the floor, forgotten.
You have to get him in the water. You have to sober him up before your own resolve disintegrates entirely.
“Legolas, lean back. Walk with me,” you say, your voice clipped. You wrap your arms around his torso, trying to bear his dead weight as you force your feet to take slow, dragging steps backwards toward the edge of the sunken bath. “Three steps. Just three steps and you can sit.”
“Too many steps,” he mutters against your skin, his voice a mere lazy vibration. He barely lifts his feet, simply letting you drag him, his fingers tightly hooked into the leather at your waist, entirely refusing to yield an inch of the proximity. “Why are we…why are we walking?”
“Because you are going to ruin us both if you collapse on the stone,” you breathe, your heel finally finding the smooth lip of the marble. “Sit down, Legolas. Let go of my waist and sit—”
He did not let go.
Instead of releasing you, his grip tightens. His boot catches on the raised trim of the marble basin, his already compromised balance giving way as his larger frame tilts forward into the steam.
You don’t even have time to gasp. With his hands clasped firmly around your hips, he pulls you straight down with him. The world inverts in a deafening explosion of white foam and scalding water.
The pool swallows you both whole. For a suffocating, disorienting moment, you are submerged in churning heat, the dark grape of the wine and sharp sting of the crushed mint flooding your senses. The heavy wool of your lieutenant’s uniform and thick leather of your boots instantly turn to lead, holding you down.
A moment later, your head breaks the surface. You gasp for air, coughing as you push your soaked bangs out of your eyes. The silver steam of the bath rises in thick clouds from the disturbance. You jam your toe against your heel, aggressively kicking the heavy leather off your feet and letting the boots sink into the shadow of the basin.
Legolas rises beside you, the water cascading off his broad shoulders in a torrential sheet. His intricate warrior braids completely unravel, the long blonde silk of his hair plastered against his chest and neck. He looks beautifully unhinged, water dripping from his jaw as he blinks through the fog, a slow, dazed smile spreading across his face.
“What did you do?” you hiss, panic finally breaking through your defenses like a flash of ice water. You lunge forward, your soaked leather gloves slapping against his slick shoulders as you try to push away from him. “Legolas! Look at my gear. Look at what you’ve done!”
“The uniform…” he slurs, a laugh bubbling in his chest as he sways in the water. He does not move back. “It is too stiff anyway. Always…always so stiff.”
“This is not a joke,” you rasp, your chest heaving as you fight the dragging weight of your wet tunic, eyes darting frantically towards the bolted door. You unbuckle your own shoulder guards and doublet, squirming against his grip. You toss the waterlogged leather out of the bath, peeling your gloves off along with it. The linen of your undershirt clings to your upper body like a second skin, and you don’t miss how his half-moon eyes wander down, pupils blown wide as he meets your gaze again. “If the guards heard that splash—if anyone comes through that door, it is my sword they will take. It is my name they will ruin. I will be stripped of my rank and exiled before the sun hits the gates.”
The word exile did not sober him. It seemed to strike his dizzy brain like a physical blow, turning his lazy drunken smile into a look of frantic terror.
He shakes his head, his wet hair spraying droplets across your face. His grip on your waist tightens, with a force which surely leaves bruises blooming in its wake. His large palms drag you through the water until your chest slams against his. He stumbles and wades forward, his feet slipping on the marble before he pins your shoulder blades flat against the slick wall of the bath.
“No,” he whispers, voice cracking, thick with wine and desperation. He leans down, forehead pressing to yours, his breath hot and rapid against your lips. “No, no. No one… no one can take you. I will not let them.” His lips are but a hair’s breadth away, flushed and stained with wine. “I will throw the swords into the river. I will lock the gates.”
“Legolas, you are out of your mind,” you whisper, hands pressing flat against his chest to try and put some space between your faces. “You are entirely drunk. Look at me, you don’t even know what you are saying. Tomorrow you will—”
“I know what I am saying,” he interrupts, voice ragged. His hands slide up from your waist, fumbling blindly until they cup your jaw, fingers threading into the hair at the back of your head. You hiss slightly from the tension at the roots. His breath is heavy, his eyes — once a reflective, royal blue — stare into yours, dark and dilated, with an intensity you do not recognise.
"I know your steps. Seventy winters... seventy winters I have been counting them." He lets out a low, miserable sound, half a laugh and half a sob, letting his head drop to rest in the crook of your neck.
“Three paces,” he mumbles against your skin, shaking his head slightly as if trying to clear a fog. “Every morning on the terrace. Every patrol. You walk behind me. Always…always behind me. Never beside me. I have spent a lifetime staring at the slant of your shoulder, wondering…absolute madness…wondering why I was not allowed to turn around.”
“Commander, please—”
“Do not,” he chokes out, his thumb dragging clumsily along your wet cheekbone, a burning trail left in its wake. He lifts his head to look at you again. “Do not call me that. Not here.” He swallows hard. “The water is… it is too hot. You are burning up. Or am I?”
He blinks heavily, his hands tremblings where they hold your face. The heat of the water and the swirling steam seems to blur his mind entirely.
“It is like the cave,” he slurs, his voice softer and far away. "The northern pass... the ice cavern. We sat in the dark for three days. It was so cold, the air was turning to frost. My skin was freezing. But here... right here..." He drags his hand down from your face, grabbing your palm, pressing it against his chest. His heartbeat gallops; an erratic thud threatening to escape from his chest. Your own matches his. "I was on fire because your head was against my chest. I had to turn myself to stone. I had to freeze my own blood so I would not…not turn around and ruin us both in the dark."
A droplet of water slides down his cheek, catching the dim candle glow of the room. He leans in closer, until his lips brush the shell of your ear as he whispers, composure undone by the decades of silent pining.
“Look at the water now,” he says, each word fueling a glowing, consuming heat in your bones. “We are not freezing anymore. Let me burn. Let me burn alive…just do not make me go back to the ice. Do not go three paces away from me again.”
His lips find yours, blazing and urgent, and the hand that cupped your jaw slides to the back of your neck, angling your face, breaking down every barrier you built up, every military protocol that you seared into your mind for decades.
He pulls back, breathless and desperate, panting against your mouth. “I will not let them take you from me,” he says, voice husky and raw.
Damn the military protocols.
Damn the rules of the court.
Damn the fabric that separates you.
You pull him back in, wrapping your arms around his shoulders, and kiss him back, feverish and hungry. He groans against your lips as his arms wrap around you under the water, forearms locking around your back and pulling your chest flush with his. You melt into the kiss, the ghost of Dorwinion grapes dancing on your tongue, the heat of his body blazing against you in the water.
He trails open-mouthed kisses along your jaw as a hand slides under your shirt and along your ribs, cupping your chest. You gasp as he continues down your neck, tongue languid and warm, kissing and nipping at the sensitive area above your collarbone, peppering marks that scatter across your skin like a constellation only he could bear witness to.
“I need you closer,” he breathes into your neck, gossamer strands of his wet hair falling across your shoulder .
The hot water made the fabric of your shirts entirely translucent, clinging to his broad chest and your skin like a futile attempt at modesty. His large hands hook onto the open collar of your wet shirt, his fingers clumsily tugging it up. You lift your arms to help him slide it off, baring your skin to the humid air. You reach for the hem of his sodden shirt, bundling the translucent linen and pulling it over his head, letting the wet cloth drift away into the dark water of the pool.
When he straightens back up, you are both bare from the waist up, his torso radiating an unnatural, consuming heat that you wanted, needed, to feel against you.
But the waterlogged wool of your trousers remains a frustrating barrier between your hips, blocking the very warmth you are starving for. Legolas feels it too; a low, frustrated groan leaves his lips as his hands dive beneath the churning surface, his thumbs dragging against your hip bones as he tries to pull the heavy fabric. His unsteady balance sways, his bare feet slipping slightly on the smooth floor of the pool.
"Help me," he mumbles against your jaw, his grip uncoordinated but fiercely possessive as he clings to you.
You catch his bare shoulders to steady him, guiding his warrior’s frame backward a half step as he sinks heavily onto the submerged marble bench behind him. Standing right between his knees, you lean down into the swirling mint-scented water, fingers finding his belt. There is no neat protocol to it — just a breathless urgency as you unbuckle the leather and peel the heavy wool down his muscular thighs. The water’s buoyancy carries the dead weight away effortlessly, and he kicks the trousers into the dark depths of the pool before his hands find your waist again. His touch is an impatient and demanding weight as you undo your own fastenings, sliding the last of the lieutenant’s uniform down your legs and letting it float away.
When you slide back towards him, there is nothing left between you.
Legolas lets out a low sigh of relief, his bare thighs instantly locking around your hips beneath the surface, hauling you flush onto his lap. He is a furnace, his large hands cup the back of your thighs, anchoring you securely against him, pulling you impossibly closer. You run your hands up his smooth chest to his shoulders, rising and falling with heavy breaths.
He does not move yet; he just holds you there, his chest heaving against yours, midnight-dark eyes blinking through the silver steam as if trying to memorize the feeling of your bare skin under the water.
“Tell me I am not dreaming this,” he rasps, his voice wine-sweet against your lips. “Tell me I will not wake up on the terrace tomorrow with three paces between us.” He gazes up at you through thick lashes, droplets glistening on them as if on a silken web. The glow from the candles dances across his porcelain face, his cheeks flushed and lips swollen, and even now you think that he looks as if carved from pure starlight.
“This is real,” you breathe, gently brushing his sharp jaw with your thumb. He shivers at your caress, eyes fluttering shut. “I am here, Legolas.”
You lean down and his mouth finds yours again — no longer just a clumsy, drunken spill of words; it is a burning surrender to the fire you had both been running from for seventy years. Your hands slide up to lock behind his neck, your fingers tangling in the damp silk of his unraveled braids, as you sink onto his length, your mind going blank to all else but the feeling of him inside you. Legolas lets out a fractured groan, a sound that sends heat right to your core as it echoes off the damp tiled walls.
The hot water laps at your chest as you move, the friction of your bare skin meeting under the water electrifying you, sending waves of pleasure coiling in your abdomen. You welcome the searing stretch as you take him, all of him; you welcome the burning of your thighs as you ride him in the churning water.
Legolas shivers against you, moaning under his breath, a full-body tremor that has nothing to do with the temperature of the room. He slumps forward slightly, his forehead dropping against your shoulder as his breathing goes ragged and fast. His lithe hands slide up from your thighs to your waist under the water, his thumbs pressing hard into your hipbones, fingernails leaving crescent imprints into your flushed skin. He anchors you to his lap so tightly that every frantic thud of his heart beats against your own ribs, every movement of his hips meets yours.
“Mine,” he murmurs into the crook of your neck, lips brushing your hot skin, sending a jolt of raging fire down your spine. He lets out a desperate groan, a broken mutter of hushed Sindarin, an unraveled confession he would never dare utter in the light. “My lieutenant, my shadow, my…you are mine. I will not let you go.”
"Yours," you promise him, tilting your head to give him better access, your own restraint completely melting into the steam. "Always yours."
“They think I am a prince…” His grip tightens on your waist, the pace of his hips bruising and possessive, chasing his high. “But I am a beggar.” He bites your neck, teeth dragging along your skin, a moan escaping your mouth as you arch into him without thought. “I have been begging for…for a single glance from you for seventy winters. I have been starved of you.”
White hot pleasure rolls through your veins as you find your release, your arms going weak around his shoulders. His arms tighten around you, drawing you in flush against him, his own hips stuttering against yours as you feel his abdomen tighten. With a final groan you feel him tense against you, head buried in the crook of your neck, blonde hair draped over your shoulders like a gossamer curtain.
After a long moment, Legolas tilts his head back against the marble rim of the pool, eyes fluttering shut. The frantic storm of his desperation has finally quieted, leaving only the gentle rise and fall of his bare chest against yours. Around you, the steam has begun to thin, and the amber glow of the candles on the vanity flicker out one by one, leaving the chamber bathed in the velvet dark of the moon and stars.
The scalding water lost its edge long ago, turning soothing and cooling against your ribs, but Legolas does not budge beneath you. His hands are still hooked securely around your waist, his grip looser, softened by the deep pull of sleep, but no less unyielding. Every time you try to shift, to ease the weight on his thighs, his fingers tighten and pull you back flush against his sternum.
“Legolas,” you whisper into the quiet room. “The fire in the hearth has died out. The water is getting cold. We have to get out.”
A hum reverberates deep in his chest. He does not open his eyes, but his head slides down to tuck over the crown of your head.
“Stay,” he murmurs, his voice honeyed and sweet. “The water does not matter. I am warm. I have you.”
He lets out a sigh, his thumb moving in slow, rhythmic circles against your hip underwater, a tactile promise that he is not letting the distance return.
“No more three paces,” he whispers into the dark, his voice growing closer to the hazy edge of dreams. “Tomorrow…you walk beside me. I am so tired of looking for you behind me. Walk beside me.”
He presses his lips to your temple, a soft and sacred vow. In the silver dark of the chamber you close your eyes, resting your forehead against his collarbone and listening to the steady beat of his heart. No longer erratic, no longer cold, but entirely and forevermore yours.
taglist: @meg11 @ninaaazz @entishramblings
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hi guys!! it’s been a while. my passion for writing is coming back slowly, sorry for the long absence and fic hiatus. rest assured dorwinion red continues!
however, i really want to …well, rewrite quite a bit of it. the story is still largely the same and would go according to my outline that i’ve dusted off, but i am no longer happy with the quality of my writing at that time. at least some of the later chapters. would yall kill me if i just.. redid some of them real quick before continuing with the rest of the chapters??😭😭
Just a gentle reminder to be kind and compassionate in the fanfiction community.
If you do not like something, do not read it. You don’t have to like it or leave kudos. You do not have to reblog it or share it. You do not have to comment on it. Just leave it be in its space.
Fanfiction is a space for people to explore and process.
Some people write fanfiction to work through emotions, wishes, and aspects of themselves that may be difficult to express elsewhere.
Some people write fanfiction to process trauma and or difficult experiences they went through.
Some people write fanfiction simply because they love a story and want to spend more time with beloved characters and worlds.
For many, fanfiction serves as a creative outlet, a coping mechanism, a form of self-discovery, and/or a way to build community with others who share their interests.
The hate comments or anon hate asks, simply are not necessary. Use your energy for other things, my dears! <3
In the wake of the Wolves of Isengard, memories of the past resurface.
Anyways,
So. Yes. Hello.
That's right, I've done it. I've finally broken the writer's block on this series and written a new chapter. Almost four years later, but I DID IT! Now everybody hold your breath and form a prayer circle so it doesn't take another four years.
Jokes aside, I truly hope you enjoy.
Note: In the OC version, I combined some of those super short chapters to consolidate and streamline things, so while the numbers are different between the two, these are the same chapter.
