A/N: Written for 2017 Tolkien Secret Santa, for ohlurr on Tumblr.
In the New Age, everything goes away.
Since dwarves love stars, and dream of stars, it comes naturally as a dream to Gimli to watch the Fellowship fade like a constellation: stars plucked out, one by one.
The halflings will blink first, falling to silence. Aragorn's beard and brow turn silver, old before Gimli even feels old.
The wizard passed on years ago.
Legolas looks exactly as he did in Rivendell, except his eyes change every day.
Dwarves live long. Blessedly, they do not live forever.
.
Legolas regards the sheen and glimmer and secrecy of the caverns in absolute silence.
Light spangles his upturned face. Gimli knows he must see beauty too. Even if this is alien to him, it must also be familiar.
Afterwards—long afterwards, when Legolas will even speak of it—Gimli broaches the subject with something like an attempt at mirth. "I almost expected you to bear it better," he ventures. "For as many hundred years as you have spent beneath ground."
The elf's gaze settles on him keenly. "That which lies behind us is no easy road to retread," he answers. "You have yet to return to your Lonely Mountain, have you not?"
And Gimli nods, once in acquiescence, and once in remembrance of how Legolas seeks not forest now, only sea.
.
"I cannot stay here forever," Legolas says. He has faced down the hordes of Saruman and Sauron, of Dol Gulder and Moria, with nothing like fear about him. Perhaps there is no fear now, either, but his face has grown too pale.
Aragorn is dying. They know this, and they walk the stones walks of Minas Tirith—stones, that like all stones, belong to Gimli's heart despite their crudeness. They know this, and yet it is Legolas who is slipping away before Gimli's eyes.
Constellations, unmoored, are simply empty spaces of sky.
.
Gimli thought he would die at Helm's Deep. Legolas, when Durin's Bane came upon them.
(These memories are softened by time.)
.
None but Aragorn bade Boromir a true goodbye. Once, their travels lead them again to Rauros.
Softly, Legolas raises his voice in the familiar verses of the winds.
Aragorn rests in his tomb. Boromir, forever in the whispers and rush of the Anduin.
Gimli presses his hand over his heart, feels it still beating, and does not sing.
.
He cannot stay here forever. The thought comes to Gimli as painfully as breathing does, these days. He has grown old, frail even. How Gloin would rant, if Gloin still lived!
But it is Legolas, a shadow arrow-straight by the shoreline, trembling eagerly with the crash of each wave.
He cannot stay here forever.
.
(Legolas is building a boat.)
(Gimli is dreaming of his father.)
.
"I cannot stay here forever," Legolas says again, and this time, there is finality in his voice. Gimli curves his knobbed knuckles over his bent knees, and feels the flicker of a star.
And then.
"Will you come with me?"
.
(The constellation, you see, is born anew.)