"Good morning, Glorfindel! Is it not a beautiful day?"

Young Glorfindel, who was sitting on his father's porch steps in Tirion and reading a book, looked up to scowl at the elfling who, as had become usual for every single other morning and evening for the past decade or so, had suddenly appeared on the other side of the front gate and was peering over it at him with a big beaming smile on his face. "Good morning, Ecthelion," he muttered, and promptly looked back down at his book.

There was a long pause.

"What are you reading?" Ecthelion asked. "Is it a good book? You look most engrossed in it."

Glorfindel pretended not to hear him. Perhaps, if he feigned deafness, the other elfling would go away. He again cursed his mother for always forcing him to be outdoors at this hour and hoped that she was not watching over him from a window and noting his unsociable behaviour towards Ecthelion. For that, he would be scolded most severely for she liked Ecthelion and praised the other elfling's attempts to befriend Glorfindel, ignoring all of Glorfindel's complaints about how much he hated the very-very-over-enthusiastic-about-befriending-him Ecthelion.

There was another long pause.

"Is something wrong, Glorfindel?" Ecthelion sounded concerned.

"No," Glorfindel muttered softly, rubbing the ball of his thumb against the edge of his page. He hated how much older than him Ecthelion seemed, even though they were both apparently the same age.

"I beg you pardon, but I did not catch that..."

"I said no!" Glorfindel said, more sharply and loudly. "Go away!" He looked back up with narrowed eyes at the other elfling who, to his intense irritation and confusion, just smiled brightly at him.

"You look very pretty, however hard you scowl," Ecthelion said.

Glorfindel glared.

"Or glare," Ecthelion added, his smile widening.

Glorfindel snapped his book shut and got up. "It is too noisy out here," he said loudly as he turned away, "I am going back inside the house."

And as had become usual over the past few weeks ever since Glorfindel had first tried to walk away from him, Ecthelion then asked, "Why do you not like me, Glorfindel?"

On this occasion, Glorfindel, rather than simply pretending not to have heard him and marching into the house, stopped walking. He did not turn back, but he did not walk away either.

"I try to befriend you every morning and every evening," Ecthelion continued. "I invite you to parties at my house every month. We were friends in our first life. You still do not remember anything, I suppose?"

Glorfindel, who truthfully did not remember anything of his first life - according to the healers, he suffered from retrograde amnesia - shook his head.

There was another long pause. Glorfindel slowly turned back to him and sat back down on the porch steps.

Presently, Ecthelion exhaled deeply. "It is a great pity," he said. "We were very close friends."

"Well, I do not remember," Glorfindel said, looking at him. His lips pursed into a pout.

Ecthelion tilted his head. "You remember nothing?" His eyes gleamed strangely. "Nothing at all?"

Glorfindel did not like the other's expression. He felt most uncomfortable, as if Ecthelion was undressing him with that piercing gaze. He reopened his book and looked back down at it. "Nothing," he said firmly. "Go away. And do not look at me that way - it makes me uncomfortable."

There was another long pause.

Presently, Ecthelion spoke again, "Well, even if you do not remember anything of our relationship, that is no reason to refuse to accept my offer of friendship now, is it?"

"But I do not like you," Glorfindel said, not looking up from his book.

Ecthelion chuckled slightly. The gate creaked as he shifted his weight slightly. "Glorfindel, you barely know me. How do you know that you do not like me?"

"I just do not like you," Glorfindel reiterated, still not looking up. "I do not have to give you a reason why."

"How childish."

"I am a child." Glorfindel glared at his page, not seeing anything, but hating Ecthelion and every moment of this conversation.

"You are an adult in a child's body. You are not a child."

"I am!"

"You are not!"

"I have amnesia! I am a child!"

There was another long pause. Ecthelion sighed again. Glorfindel, though he had not read the pages in front of him, turned to the next page. He propped his elbow on his knee and his chin on his hand and stared hard at the new page.

"Glorfindel," Ecthelion said then, his voice weary. "You were a very very close friend of mine. I loved and still love you very dearly - so dearly that it is painful for me to be apart from you - excruciatingly so. Please be my friend."

"No." Glorfindel flicked to a new page, then suddenly realised that he had probably not spent enough time on the previous page to add weight to his pretense at reading and flipped back. Then he flipped forward again when he realised that flipping back would tell Ecthelion for sure that he was not reading at all. Maybe Ecthelion would believe that he had simply been refering back to something mentioned on the previous page.

After all, Ecthelion was distracting him - that added weight to him needing to refer back to a previous page.

"Glorfindel, please?"

"No."

"Valar! You are such a stubborn elf!"

"Elfling!" Glorfindel corrected, still not looking up. "Go away."

"Well, it seems that I have no choice," Ecthelion said, with another great sigh. The gate creaked again as he straightened. "Well, I do hope this amnesia will not cause you to do anything foolish."

Glorfindel did not answer that comment.

"I will see you tonight, then," Ecthelion called as he turned and started walking away. "To wish you pleasant dreams!"

Glorfindel did not answer that either. Ignoring the elf was the only way to assure himself of eventually, albeit temporarily, getting rid of him.

"Every day and every night until you finally remember me..." Ecthelion said more softly, assumedly more to himself than to Glorfindel as he was still walking away. "That is provided the fool does not completely lose what remains of his mind and runs away to Middle-earth."

Glorfindel stiffened at that and looked up to watch the other elfling walk away. Then he looked back down at the book in his hands. It was a book that contained a chapter on Middle-earth. A chapter that he had just discovered by his recent flick of the page. He tilted his head as he gazed at the chapter's title and the name that conjured up fantastic images in his head of that strange land in the east. A thoughtful expression entered his face.

"Ecthelion-free," he said softly.