A/N: Title from a Naomi Shihab Nye poem.
"The bow," his father says. His father, silver-eyed and silver-handed, at least when the diamond edge of the blade rings in his hand. "You choose the bow?"
Legolas will be king one day. He will take the carven throne beneath the earth, a place of wood rather than of stone. He will not venture, so often, into glades of green light and gentle air.
He turns an arrow in his hand, imagines its flight. Imagines a thunderstorm held solely in shaft and gray feathers.
(A sword stays closer to hand, to earth.)
(His father.)
"Yes," he says. Whether it be a king's weapon or no, he lifts his head. "Yes, I choose the bow."
.
The rain falls cold and resolute. It mingles with blood, and this is unholy, for orc and elf ought not fall side-by-side in death. Legolas steels his gaze, and thinks not at all about the way his boots are slick with mud and worse than mud. Thinks not at all of the fair faces crushed beneath fair helms, of the gnarled hands and gap-toothed mouths that lie with them, forever.
Legolas nocks arrow to bow, arrow to bow, holds the thunderstorm in his fingers and his shoulder.
The rain plasters his braids against his neck.
In the distance, Aragorn shouts his name.
.
Between the sinews of the great cruel beast runs an artery, a river of lifeblood. His arrow strikes it.
His arrow is not enough.
.
"For elves to die is needless." Thranduil's voice slashes through the air. Through memory, now. "They called on me to send our people to ruin, and I did. Lives ended that were never meant to end. Remember that."
His father never forgave the dwarves. Legolas knows this. A people of stone and greed, a people who asked too much.
The Deeping Wall bursts like a handful of thrown pebbles. The bodies that fall are men, and orcs, and his own kin.
Failure is something he has not known since they cowered under the knees of the snowclad mountains.
Legolas' bow is slack in his hands.
.
"I am sorry."
Aragorn's hand stills around a cup of mead. It might be his fourth, but Legolas levies no judgment. He has drained barrels in his day, and he has done so again tonight. His fingertips give him away, surely. They tingle and tremble, but the sickness stealing over him is like no liquored warmth he knows.
"Sorry? My friend, for what?"
All of a moment, he might as well be there again: under heavy rain, in the cold, in the night that almost had no morning. The Galadhrim will be buried with honor, but they will buried. Two thousand souls less than Valinor should have seen.
Two thousand souls, needless.
(He has wondered, since that night, how many stood on the wall.)
(How many died on it.)
"My arrow," he says. "My aim. It was not—true."
Someday, he will be king. Is that not his destiny? And his hands are steady and his brow is unlined by the span of years. He looks east with foreboding, but not with fear.
He laughs with the dwarf and the hobbits, with the men of Rohan who are hot-blooded and fierce.
None of this would his father understand. None of this—and failure.
Aragorn sets down the cup. Aragorn's face, bytimes, shows every hurt it has ever known. "Had you taken him," he says. "They would have sent another. The wall fell by treachery, Legolas. Not by your hand."
(A sword stays closer to hand, to earth.)
(A sword would not have saved them, either.)
He bows his head. "Nonetheless," he murmurs. "I owe you a debt. Of your trust."
Aragorn stands. Aragorn raises the cup, and holds it out to him. Legolas drinks, and feels golden mead singing in his veins.
"Not a debt," Aragorn says. "Never that."
Lives ended that were never meant to end.
What business do an elf, a man, and a dwarf have in the Riddermark?
Legolas lifts his head.