You can sort of consider this a bit closer to book canon than movie canon, in that the invasion of all that is evil into Greenwood/Mirkwood happened much earlier on in the Third Age than the movies imply (Though not as early as it did in book canon). The Silvan Elves, led by Thranduil, still abandoned Amon Lanc/Dol Guldur in TA 1000, but Sauron himself didn't take up residence there until long after TA 1050.
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Though she supposed she should count her blessings, Tauriel found duty near the capital to be remarkably monotonous.
She had started work as a guard a few months ago, and they had been quiet months indeed. Tauriel did understand the need to be grateful for that; she had heard horrible stories about what guards stationed at the posts near Dol Guldur and at the posts on other remote locations in Mirkwood. Tauriel did understand that there was great need to be grateful for a quiet post so close to Thranduil's halls, but at the same time, it was horribly dull.
Her work consisted of standing around in the forest, doing her best to be as inconspicuous as she possibly could be and watching for any threats that might be lurking around in the shadowed forest. The only time Tauriel saw any of her fellow guards was at shift-change; they were stationed too far apart from one another in this dense, twisted forest to even see each other. The only way Tauriel would have known if any of her fellows had fallen under threat would be if they were to sound their horns. The guards were instructed not to initiate a conversation with anyone who wasn't a guard, and most knew not to talk with the guards unless they were in some sort of distress.
Tauriel bit her lip to keep from sighing, and cast a glance upwards. Anor was high in the sky; she could see her light through the branches and the leaves. Her shift wasn't over for another six hours, at least. Another six hours of standing out here, in silence, waiting for a threat that would likely never get past the outer ring of guards without the alarm being sounded.
Someone small was moving through the trees.
Tauriel frowned as the person, a child, she realized, moved closer towards her. Close enough, eventually, that she could identify him. She recognized the richness of his tunic, if nothing else. There was the King's young son, wandering alone in the forest.
Though she was not supposed to speak unless approached first, Tauriel knew that Thranduil would not be happy if he discovered his only child gone; the King's protectiveness of his son was legendary throughout the capital. And it wasn't like there were any witnesses to see her break the commandment against speaking out.
Just as she was about to lift her voice to tell Legolas to return to his home, the boy caught her eye and waved.
Tauriel lifted her eyebrows. Given Thranduil's usual aloof behavior, she hadn't expected his son to do something so prosaic (and forwardly friendly) as waving when he saw someone else in the forest. Then again, the boy wasn't even half-grown, and Legolas was not in all respects the spitting image of his father.
Feeling frankly rather ridiculous, Tauriel waved back. Then, she pointed in the direction of the Halls.
Legolas seemed to understand. He nodded, and turned back towards the Halls, quickly disappearing in the undergrowth.
Tauriel didn't bother biting her lip this time; she sighed, and returned to her very routine, very safe, but very boring post.
-0-0-0-
The next morning, Legolas came into the woods outside the Halls again. Tauriel hoped that he was just wandering, that he was just stomping around in the forest as young children did. She hoped that he would stay in sight of the Halls—it really wasn't safe for a child to be wandering out here by themselves, out of sight of anybody, even in broad daylight—and would stay within sight of one of the guards, even her, if necessary, but she hoped that he wasn't going to be making a habit of seeking her out. She knew very well how that would look, and did not need that, not at all.
Her hopes were dashed, at it happened. Legolas saw her standing in her usual spot, and made a beeline for the young guard.
This time, Tauriel did not bother trying to direct him back into the Halls. Legolas was often seen alone, in his father's halls or out in the forest; Tauriel knew that she was not the first guard to spot the young boy wandering the forests, nor the first guard to be approached by him. She suspected that Legolas was often alone, when he wasn't with his tutors receiving the sort of lessons a boy his age would be expected to learn.
Beneath Thranduil's hard-drinking, rather fickle exterior there was a very dedicated King, who unfortunately as a result seemed not to have as much time for his son as a father typically would. The duties of a King simply did not allow for that. And as for the Queen… Tauriel's jaw clenched as she recalled what had happened to the Queen.
The Queen had vanished in the forest a few years ago, along with roughly two dozen others. They'd just wandered into the woods one misty autumn day, and never returned. Tauriel had still been a trainee at the time, but the trainees had been called upon to search the same as the guards. They never found the corpses, nor the bones, of those who had vanished; they burned out the nearest Spider nest and found nothing. They searched for weeks, and found nothing. Those two dozen, the Queen included, were almost certainly dead, but without ever finding their bodies, it was as though the forest had swallowed them whole. The forest did not belong to the Silvan-folk any longer, Tauriel reflected bitterly. It had not in a long time.
The sight of a child, wandering alone in the forest with no one able to spare the time to look after him… Tauriel felt a sharp jolt in her gut. She would have to be heartless not to sympathize with him. And a liar not to empathize with him.
So when Legolas did indeed walk right up to her, and smiled tentatively, Tauriel smiled back, and didn't try to shoo him away. He did need to stay within sight of one of the guards, after all.
"Erm, what's your name?" Legolas asked, his face locked in an obviously forced solemn expression that Tauriel could only suppose he had picked up from his father. Anyone who knew Thranduil knew the sort of strange, forced expression he wore on a day to day basis.
"Tauriel," she replied, deciding again that since there were no witnesses, she just wouldn't worry about breaking the commandment against speaking. And Legolas had spoken to her first anyways.
Legolas's light gray eyes strayed to the knife hilts visible over her shoulders. "Can you use those knives?" he inquired curiously, tilting his head slightly.
At this, Tauriel had to fight to keep from cracking a grin.
Those knives? Glorwen, her housemate, often called her a show-off as regards to those knives. She wasn't the only one. The verdict was clear: Tauriel was indeed a show-off as regards to her knives. But she very much enjoyed having the sort of skill with them that she did, especially considering that archery had come to her more naturally than fighting with knives. She had been told that since she was rather short, and did not have as much reach as would those who were taller than her, she shouldn't rely on those knives in combat, but Tauriel liked to consider herself competent. She had never seen combat, but surely her speed and strength would suffice.
"Yes, I can." Tauriel looked at the hopeful look on the boy's face, and guessed at what he was hoping for. "Do you want to see?"
Legolas grinned and nodded. Tauriel grinned, and slid her knives from their sheaths.
-0-0-0-
Over the next few days, Legolas kept walking up to her in the woods; Tauriel became used to spotting a half-grown child in a rich green tunic picking his way carefully through the undergrowth as he walked towards her. Sometimes he wanted to talk; sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he only lingered for a few minutes; sometimes for nearly an hour. Sometimes, he just sat nearby and stared into the wilderness without saying anything. Either way, it became quite routine for the King's son to show up and keep her company.
She didn't mind his company, honestly; he was a polite child, had been raised well. If anything, the boy was rather personable. All the same, the situation was perplexing. Tauriel didn't know when she had become the unofficial royal child-minder. Privately, she only half-jokingly wondered if she should petition for a pay raise. This was clearly not what she had signed on for.
The other guards knew now; Legolas had been out in the woods with her one evening at shift change. From what Tauriel understood, this wasn't the first time he had shadowed one of the guards. A few of her friends recounted stories with smiles on their faces, and she got the impression that it was something they all simply took in stride.
Merendir, one of her fellow guards, teasingly remarked that she needed to be careful about getting ideas above her stations.
Tauriel snorted.
She understood the concept of hereditary authority. She understood the concept of leaders who inherited their positions from their forebears. However, the idea of a King with absolute power over his subjects, the idea of a sharp, deep divide in status between that King's family and his subjects, well, that was a very Sindarin notion. And even if she lived among a mixed multitude of Sindar and Silvan-folk, even if she spoke the language and abided by many of their customs, Tauriel was not a Sinda. Certain things about them made no sense to her, even if she went along with it.
"No, no, don't hold it like that; you'll cut your own hand off."
Legolas gaped at her, aghast, and Tauriel shrugged. "So it might not be that bad. But you'll still hurt yourself if you hold the knife like that." And your father will likely throw me down the nearest mountainside, she added silently.
He had begged, and begged, and begged, to be allowed to hold her knives and learn how to hold them correctly, and finally, Tauriel had given in. The face he made when pleading was just entirely too adorable; all wide eyes and hopefully twitching mouth. Tauriel wondered if Thranduil was capable of denying his son anything, if this was the look Legolas gave him too.
"Now," she went on, eyes gleaming as she brandished her other knife, "in combat a knife is good for stabbing and slashing both. However, given the length of these knives, stabbing is certainly more practical unless you think you could cut off a limb or cut someone's throat."
Legolas would almost certainly be taught to fight at some point. He was the King's son, after all, and would be called upon to defend his home when he was grown. It would be good for him to get an early start. Tauriel watched the boy jab at the air with the knife in his hand, her lip twitching in the beginnings of a smile. He certainly was eager to learn.
-0-0-0-
Come the end of the week, Tauriel went off-duty, gratefully taking her rest in the house she shared with Glorwen, one of many little wooden houses clustered outside of Thranduil's Halls. The guards of Mirkwood operated on a rotating system. There were six shifts, and each of the shifts worked for ten days and then rested for the next five, either from dawn to dusk, or dusk to dawn. It was a decent system, Tauriel supposed; at the very least, she was grateful to work from dawn until dusk, and not the other way around.
It was a quiet few days. She did like many of her fellow guards and spent a great deal of her time at the nearest tavern. There really wasn't a great deal for a guard to do during their off-hours, aside from getting drunk and practicing their swordsmanship or skill in archery (Hopefully not both at the same time). Tauriel got drunk. She nursed the inevitable hangovers the next morning, rubbing her forehead and wincing at the light of Anor drifting down through the dense tree branches.
In the afternoons, she would go to the archery range, either with Glorwen or with Belorn and Lhinhel, or else she would practice with her knives, or just stay at home and read through the books of herbs she had taken out of the book archive within the Halls. Lhinhel had broken her arm recently, and it was still healing. The healer Coruloth had told her not to use the arm until it had fully healed, but Lhinhel ignored her. Tauriel watched dubiously as her friend's arm shook and beads of sweat gathered on Lhinhel's olive skin. Any attempts at telling Lhinhel to take it easy was met with a terse snap that she couldn't afford to rest her arm for the amount of time that it would take for her to heal. "I can not afford to go out of practice."
Sometimes, in the evening, when Tauriel went to the tavern, she would listen as older guards exchanged stories. It was always the same stories; they didn't have any new ones to circulate.
Yrch roamed the Misty Mountains, attacking travelers at will. The Men of Rhovanion contended with plague. Arnor was laid waste. The world around them, so close, was in chaos, and the folk of Mirkwood did absolutely nothing about it.
There was a reason Tauriel drank.
She listened to those stories with bitterness. She thought about her home with bitterness. The borders of Thranduil's lands were being chipped away, bit by bit by bit. The evils of the world lurked outside, and had found their way in. Greenwood the Great was no more. There was only Mirkwood now, dark, misty, Spider-haunted. No longer safe even for its people. The outside world wasn't safe for anyone. And they did nothing.
When Tauriel first became a guard, she had thought the job would consist of something more than simply standing around in the forest, making sure no threat reached Thranduil's halls. She wasn't sure, now, just what she had thought she would be doing, but she thought it would be more than what she did, more than sitting in taverns and listening to tales of terror in the outside world.
Who was she, to sit idly by while the world fell under shadow? Tauriel wondered angrily. Who was she to sit and listen, comfortably in a tavern while listening to her fellows recount tales of horror as though they were so remote. Oh yes, the tales of Spiders were immediate and filled with whispering voices and wide, horror-stricken eyes. But the tales of horror in the outside world were spoken of with an impersonal shrug of the shoulder.
So many behaved as though east Rhovanion, Rhûn, Arnor and the Misty Mountains were part of an entirely different world. They weren't. Mirkwood was part of the same world as all the rest, and no matter how insulated they were to become from the rest of the world, they could not be separate from it.
If Tauriel knew anything, she knew that she had no right to sit idly by. Something had to be done. She just wasn't sure what, yet.
-0-0-0-
"Tauriel, are you sure you don't want to go to the tavern with me?"
Not looking up from her book, Tauriel shook her head. "No, not tonight."
Glorwen snorted. "You prefer to keep your nose buried in that book, do you?"
"Tonight, yes."
"You know, Tauriel, you're a bit too young to be so averse to the idea of having a bit of fun."
At this, Tauriel finally looked up from her book, eyebrows raised. "Glorwen, going on-duty tomorrow morning hung-over is far from my idea of fun. Have you ever met Lieutenant Heledhien?"
Glorwen paused for a moment, then winced. "Ah, yes, I think I do see what you're talking about now. She is… Yes, she is quite legendary." Glorwen's eyes settled on the book open on the table in what passed for their sitting room, lit only by the candle sitting on the table nearby. "Are you still studying herb lore?"
Tauriel nodded, smiling lopsidedly. "Yes, I am, but reading about plants in general has become quite interesting. Did you know that there are six sub-species of elanor?" Tauriel didn't usually do a great deal of reading; she was happiest, during her off-hours, when she was doing something physical. But this was honestly fascinating.
Her housemate pressed her lips together, pushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "No, I didn't, Tauriel. Are you going to apprentice under the healer Coruloth, then? I mean, you keep reading about herb lore, but you can't learn healing out of a book."
"Perhaps. It would be a useful skill to have, certainly."
"Here? Undoubtedly. Well, I'm off."
"Alright. Try not to fall down a ravine again."
Standing in the doorway, Glorwen rolled her eyes. "Very funny, Tauriel." She slipped out into the dusk, shutting the door behind her.
-0-0-0-
Several hours later, Tauriel was standing in the doorway of her home, staring out into the misty dark. Glorwen hadn't returned from the tavern. This was nothing unusual. Tauriel could remember times when she and her housemate had stayed in the tavern until the early hours of the morning when the barkeeper tossed them all out. But Glorwen had a tendency to return home falling-down drunk, and at times like that, she had a hard time getting the door open. Tauriel would rather her friend didn't end up having to sleep on the stoop, for more than one reason.
She stared into the gloom, arms folded across her chest, watching for Glorwen's tall, lanky form. Eventually, she did see someone, but that someone was significantly smaller than Glorwen.
"Legolas?"
The boy looking up, startled, was all the confirmation Tauriel needed of his identity. She stared at him, gaping slightly, before regaining power of speech. "Come inside!" she hissed, waving frantically and casting her eyes around in the dark. Suddenly the darkness that seemed only impenetrable now seemed like a cloak for the dangers of the woods. "Quickly!"
Legolas hastened inside her house, and Tauriel shut the door behind him, latching it—she would just have to keep an ear out for Glorwen. Legolas lingered near the doorway, and she frowned down at him, hands on her hips. "What must your father be doing right now?" Tauriel asked pointedly.
He shuffled his feet. "Looking for me?"
"I've no doubt." Thranduil was probably working himself up into a state of nervous collapse as they spoke, absolutely frantic. However… Tauriel shook her head, sighing. "You'll have to stay here until morning. It's not safe for a child to be out at night," she explained, seeing the mystified look on Legolas's face.
Even this close to the Halls, literally living just outside of them, it wasn't safe to be out at night. On one occasion, a drunkard had been taken from his path by a Spider on his way home, even here. There was talk of withdrawing into the Halls altogether, leaving the homes and buildings outside of it abandoned. Tauriel, when sober and armed, would have been fine, walking to the Halls in the dark, and no one ever left the tavern alone anymore, but Legolas would not be safe. Even with Tauriel with him, he would not be safe, because he could not defend himself.
Legolas stared around the sitting room, the kitchen sitting next to it, peered through Tauriel's open bedroom door. "Is this where you live?" His voice was full of curiosity, his eyes wide.
Tauriel bit her lip, and nodded. "Yes, it is. My young friend, why are you wandering around in the dark?" she asked tiredly.
The boy met her gaze still, but did not answer.
This would get nowhere, it was plain. "Alright, you should go lie down and try to sleep. I'm going to take you back to your home early in the morning, before I have to go on-duty." Tauriel nodded towards her bedroom door, supposing that she would just sleep in the chair in the sitting room tonight. She knew from experience that asking a child to sleep in a chair or on the floor rarely went well.
"Yes, Tauriel," Legolas replied, with a meekness that was frankly unlike him. But before he wandered off to bed, he had one more question to ask. "Umm… Tauriel… Why do you sound different from the other Edhil here?"
He was talking about her accent, and Tauriel would have liked to note that she was not the only one living in the capital who had it, and that her accent was not as thick as it had once been anyways. Instead, she drew in a deep breath, trying to find a way to explain that would not involve explaining too much. Finally, she settled on a terse, "I was born in the last settlement in the south of Mirkwood, near Dol Guldur."
An instant change came over Legolas's face at that. His expression became deliberately blank and closed-off. "Oh," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."
Tauriel gritted her teeth. A child as young as him should not have been able simply to hear the words 'Dol Guldur' and know why she had needed to relocate here. And Thranduil, it could be noted, did not let the orphaned children of his realm, the ones without families to look after them, starve and fade away into poverty and homelessness. He took care of his own. That much could be said of him.
She knelt down in front of the boy, smiling half-heartedly. "Do you know what I am going to do, Legolas?"
He shook his head, brow furrowing as though apprehensive of what she was going to say.
Tauriel was able to smile more genuinely as she said, "I am going to make the world as safe as I can. I want to make it as safe for everyone to live in as I possibly can. And I want to protect the people I care about. Not just here in Mirkwood, but in the lands surrounding ours as well."
"How are you going to do that?" Legolas's expression was one of uncertainty, as though he could see, already, how great a task that was when the world around them was constantly falling into shadow.
The smile faded on her face. "I'm not sure yet. But I will do it," Tauriel said resolutely. "Now get some sleep."
Legolas crawled into the thin cot, grimacing as he floundered about, trying to find a comfortable position on the thin mattress. Tauriel settled into the sitting room chair, watching the door, waiting for Glorwen to come back, thinking about the future.