So, I've pretty much alienated about 99.999% of this website by writing a oneshot entirely dedicated to an OC barely anyone has read about.
For anyone who is reading my work for the first time, the basic gist is that Faelwen and Legolas are childhood sweethearts. They made a mutual decision to stop their courtship when things went truly gnarly in the south, and swore to re-kindle things in the Undying Lands. She is his second in command, and a bit of a hard-ass, and in all honesty it makes a far more interesting relationship to write. Please don't be put off by a very much established OC. Pretend it's you if you wish :)
To my regular readers, I present you with this: a collection of their firsts, right up until the last. I have always been quite blown away by how much people love these two together (or not together, really) and they're an absolute delight to write. Their love story is so barely touched upon, entirely written in hints and allusions, that I was craving something a bit more substantial.
This has not spent the usual month or two of being obsessively read and re-read and pulled into bits, so apologies if the quality has suffered, but I truly hope you enjoy this.
MyselfOnly
~{O}~
The first time she meets him, she dislikes him.
He is in the company of his mother, visiting her kin outside of the palace. They come to the talans and word of it is upon everyone's lips: such a beautiful Queen, one of their own, graceful and kind and gentle. The Prince: small but fine and strong and so much like his father. He grips his mother's hand and stares at them all curiously, but there is also such a challenge there. He is dressed simply, but his clothes are fine and he wears boots upon his feet. His hair is summer gold – odd in one of Silvan blood – and it is too long to be hanging so loose; all unruly and in the way of a stern face that gives away nothing at all.
He is released by his mother and sent to play with them – the other children, although they are so few – and he is the smallest by far. The youngest of them all, the last of the children born in the wood.
He takes off his boots as soon as he is out of sight, and it is not long before he is running with the others, but Faelwen stays away. He is not one of them, not truly. He sleeps in a bed of feather down and has never caught his own food. He does not run in the rain, but rather spends his days behind walls. He will learn of language and statecraft, he will be taught to be a prince. No laegrim would ever live such a life, because no laegrim could survive it.
Soft and spoiled, weak. A Sindar.
She pushes him in the river, and she had expected him to cry and run to his mother. Instead he barrels into her and then they are both in the river, and he is not weak at all! He is no less wild than the least of them – indeed he has teeth, this one – and she gets a black eye for her troubles.
The next time he visits, she joins them.
~{O}~
The first time that they hold hands, they are fleeing for their lives.
They have become separated – they should never have gone so far from the others – and there is a cat loose in the woods. They are too young to fight it, too small and inexperienced, unarmed and alone, and so they run. He slips his hand into hers and they are nearly the same height now, the difference in their age less apparent with time, but although he is younger it is Legolas that leads them. It is Legolas that pulls her away, Legolas that knows the woods better than she does, despite all of her many years running them before he arrived.
Legolas has cut his head at some point, and the blood runs down his face. When he grins at her she is surprised at first because she is so afraid that her heart is ready to burst, but after a moment she cannot help but mirror it back. It is wild and not entirely sane – not completely – but she understands it, because this is frightening and dangerous, but ai, what a feeling!
He is surefooted and certain, she takes great heart from his courage and their headlong, maddened flight changes. It began as something fed by terror but now her fear becomes something else: something burning and wildfire bright, alarming and exhilarating.
Breathless she grins, gripping his hand all the tighter. He leads, and she follows him, and they run.
~{O}~
The first time that she breaks, it is Legolas that tries to hold her together.
Her whole family – lost in one night: her mother and father and older brother, all of them gone.
She will see them again one day, she knows that, but they are not here any longer and there are many, many long years between them now. Years without them, centuries of being alone, and their deaths were not peaceful. They were violent and bloody and they must have hurt… they must have been so frightened.
Legolas holds her: a tangle of rage and grief, ready to fly apart. He holds her as she screams and fights, holds her even as she hits him – her rage blind and unreasoning. He holds her until she falls, until she cannot stand another moment longer, and when she loses herself to grief it is wild and formless. Her tears are white hot and she can barely breathe through it all, and he is there.
He speaks to her, his words are nonsense because he knows she cannot hear him. It is his voice that she clings to, his strong arms wrapped so tightly around her, his pale eyes that understand… they understand everything.
She breaks, and he holds all of her pieces together.
~{O}~
The first time that she notices, they are racing one another – just the two of them – and it is one of the moments in her life that she revisits over and over again in the centuries that follow.
It is not the wind that whips her hair into her eyes that steals her breath away, it is not the cold or the fact that she is already exhausted. It is not laughter – although they are laughing almost too hard to run properly – but it is something else… something new.
The two of them have left the others setting up their camp, because they are too tired for such nonsense and they have swiftly thinning patience for the two young laegrim. There is a morning frost upon the ground, and it is strange to come into dawn when they have not yet stopped to sleep. They are frayed and pushed almost to their limits, past exhaustion and into a strange restlessness. It is leading to faintly ridiculous things: things such as challenging one another to a race at dawn in the heart of winter, when they are all but dead on their feet and meant to be snatching what brief rest they can.
It is cold enough to hurt, cold enough to burn, but the rising sun is fire gold and catches their breath as it plumes in the air. Legolas is lit golden: his skin and clothing, his tangled and knotted hair, all burnished with the new light. He is caught in the dawn, his face lit by laughter; eyes bright and the bluest of any blue she has ever known before. It feels as though it is the first time she has ever, truly seen him.
In the years ahead when she remembers that dawn, she does not recall who won the race. She does not care.
~{O}~
The first time that she begins to understand, it is not a pleasant realisation.
She is not the only elleth that trains in their group, not by any count, but she is the only one born laegrim. She has never felt outnumbered – because the Sindar ranks are positively teeming with women – and it is many years before she realises that the women-folk of other races do not often fight.
She is faster and stronger and more skilled than the ellyn of her age and kin, and the last person to make a joke about her going into battle wearing a dress ended up with a broken nose. She has not had to work any harder to prove herself, no harder to make a place for herself; she has earned her position, but no more so than Legolas or Idhren, Sidhion or Alagos.
It is a strange thing then, when she begins to measure herself against the young Sindar elleth that Legolas has befriended.
Lauriel, her name is, and she is delicate and pleasant and she does not shout very often. She is skilled enough – she would not be training with them otherwise – but she is also clever and quick witted. She has a tidy hair all of the time and her jerkin is not torn and dirty, her face is mostly clean. She knows of books and language and does not swear all that much.
When she sees Legolas walking with her, talking or laughing with the Sindar girl, Faelwen feels a knot of something ugly and painful in her stomach and it is very new. She does not like it at all, and spends an afternoon examining her mess of acorn brown hair that never, ever stays up and is always, always in her face. She washes her hands and her face, she tries to think of any book that she has read for enjoyment and not just because she has been made to, and she comes up blank.
Then she becomes angry, because she has never measured herself in this way before. Never in her whole life has she felt self-conscious or graceless or uneducated, and so she shouts at Legolas over something small and silly. He is surprised and a little hurt, and so she gets all the angrier and then flees. She has never cried in front of him before and does not intend to start, and now she feels guilty and foolish and there is still that awful feeling in her stomach.
She runs away, she does not come back for two days, and when she returns things are different. She sees him differently, because she understands.
The next time that he walks with Lauriel she joins them, and every time after that until the Sindar elleth understands as well. Legolas does not understand, but then he has always been a little slow at times and so she is willing to wait.
He will understand one day.
~{O}~
The first time that she weeps for him, it is terror and not sadness that draws her tears.
They hide, they are being searched for, but it is not just their own people that look for them and so they must be silent and wait. They are tucked away in the thickest tangle of briar and bramble that she can find, half in and half out of a small hole in the ground, and she is so frightened that she can barely breathe.
It is not the orcs that frighten her, it is not that they are alone or that she has watched three of her friends cut down just a short few hours ago. It is not that she grieves – although it is taking everything to stop from thinking about it – because it is not the first time that she has seen death. She will grieve later for them… later when they are found and safe and home.
They must be found. They absolutely must!
Legolas is curled into her lap, his hands gripping the fabric of her sleeve and his body is tight and shaking beneath her hands. He makes the smallest movements: sluggish things that speak of pain and a desperate wish for relief, as though he would run away from this if only he could. Her hands are clasped tightly – one upon the other – over the wound across his chest, trying to staunch the blood. Deep… it is so deep!
An orcish blade has cut him; an ugly wound, ragged and torn. His whole front is a wash of redness: it is on his face and on her lap, coating her hands almost to the elbow and sinking into cold and wet soil. The blood will not stop, no matter how tightly she holds onto it, and he is starting to fade.
His face is moon pale, his eyes fever bright. His breath hitches and gasps with pain but he does not cry out, he makes no sound at all other than those awful, soft breaths and they are starting to weaken and fail.
She takes a moment to brush his hair from his face, she leaves a trail of red behind and he is looking right into her eyes. She avoids them, avoids his regard so desperately that he responds by shifting his clumsy grip to her elbow. He grips her arm, a brief thing of reassurance, but it is so very weak.
He is going to die…
By Elbereth and Iluvatar, she is going to lose him and she had never thought of it before; not once had she imagined him not being there. She imagines tomorrow without his silence, without his quiet confidence, without those small smiles and that terrible rage buried so deep beneath the surface. She imagines a sunrise without him there to watch it with her, or a storm in which they do not run side by side, and she begins to weep.
She is afraid. She has been afraid many times in her life before and she has been brave through all of them. She has not wept or fallen to fear in this way, not ever in her life, but by the stars and the Song this is a fear she has never known. It is a blinding scream in her mind, a metallic taste upon her tongue, a haze upon her vision and a shaking in every part of her.
She weeps, desperate and silent, because this is happening and she cannot stop it. She had never understood before, had never even thought of it, but it is a terrible and sudden realisation that she finds herself in and she is not prepared for it… not at all.
What she is most afraid of is losing him.
~{O}~
The first time Legolas notices, she doesn't entirely know what to do with herself.
She is arguing with someone, of all things. They are deep in the south, so far away from home, and it has been so long since they last saw anything other than split and dying trees, choking moss and spider webs that they have all become just that little bit too wild.
The air does not move here, the sun does not shine. Birds rarely call and when they do it is mournful, echoing and sad. They have been fighting for weeks, all of them touched by the darkness and wildness and of course they are all laegrim, each and every one of them, and so they are starting to change. They should return home soon, if only to remind themselves that they are elves.
Tempers run high, quick to flare and vicious. She argues, but only because it is her place… her right to do so. No one has the right to question Legolas, not a single one of them, because he has kept them alive when any other captain might have failed. He has kept them safe, kept them going, kept them moving ever onward when any single one of them would have stopped and simply given up long ago. To start questioning him now has her blood racing, her heart beating so fast in rage that it hurts in her chest.
She argues, and her hair is all in her face and she is filthy. Her anger has her words short and clipped, nasty and frightening, and when Idhren pulls her away from the cowed elf she has slammed against a tree she catches Legolas' gaze for just a minute. There is an odd look there, and she is too angry to recognise it at first.
Later, when all has calmed, she climbs to the top of the highest tree she can find.
It is slippery and ancient, and it is perhaps foolish to wander away from the others but she does not care. She needs this… she needs it so very badly.
Above the canopy the air is cool and cut through with the smell of rain, and of their far distant home. She can smell greener woods, a forest alive and healthy, and beating constantly in time with the heartbeat of the laegrim. The stars are covered by faint, pale clusters of cloud but she can still see them; she can feel their light against her closed eyes, against her upturned face. She feels the Song through all of it, but the stars are the loudest; almost too much to bear.
When she opens her eyes again he is there, sat quite contentedly beside her. He turns and smiles – ai that smile of his! – and there is that look again. It is thoughtful, full of something that she cannot name and she finds herself blushing like a girl. She would turn away to hide her face, because she is suddenly unsure of herself, suddenly and inexplicably nervous, but he reaches out before she can do anything. One pale, elegant hand brushes her hair away from her face and brushes her cheek, and she is frozen.
It is the first time that he has ever looked at her so completely, so absolutely, and she knows that she will spend the rest of her days wanting nothing more than to be seen by him.
~{O}~
The first time that she truly dances, it is with Legolas.
She wears a blue dress – a simple thing of home spun wool – and he has on a loose shirt of the palest green. They are both barefoot, and his hand rests softly upon her loose hair, gentle upon the base of her back.
It is barely dancing – not really. Music plays and the laegrim laugh and roast game upon huge fires, happy to be home and resting even if it is for just a few short days. Families are reunited and songs are being sung for the joy of the wood, and of home… for the start of the summer, and the long days before them.
Legolas and Faelwen stand aside from it all, sharing breath and warmth, moving like the soft swaying of the trees in a spring wind. He smells of wood sap and loam, and of rain in the wood. She is warm and soft beneath his hands, tucked perfectly against him with her eyes closed.
She has never danced before – not like this – because she has never known a reason to dance. Fighting is dancing, in a way, and she supposes that their courtship has been a dance: one of shouting and angry words, and insults and absolute, perfect trust in one another. She has wanted this, but she has never danced before and so it has not come easily.
She has known for a very long time that she had found her partner, whether she has been happy about it or not. Legolas has been longer in his understanding, or perhaps his acceptance, or perhaps in just showing it, but now that they are here she knows that nothing will ever stop their dancing.
They will dance until the breaking of the world.
~{O}~
The last time they are together it is bitter and awful, and the most painful thing that she has ever, ever done.
They have said that it is their decision but it is not… not truly, because how could they ever give this up? How can they say: 'this is the last of our days together' and not die tomorrow, if it is true?
The Darkness has made this decision, the fight has sealed it, and they have accepted the truth of it, if not the reality. They have forever – all of forever – but suddenly the words mean something to her where they never have before. Forever has no number, forever has no end. Forever is not a thing that she can hold in her hand or watch as it nears. It is the first time that she has ever understood the nature of time, the length of a year, because there are suddenly far too many of them yet to live.
So many where they must be apart.
Tomorrow she will wake, tomorrow he will be there, and tomorrow he will be her captain and her prince and nothing more. A part of her believes that it might be easier if one of them sailed, because then she would not have to feel that wildfire bright presence there at her side every single cursed day. At her side, but completely out of reach.
But she cannot, and she knows that he cannot, because there is far too much to do. Too many battles yet to fight, too much darkness yet ahead of them, too many friends yet to lose… all in the name of a far distant peace that, in complete honesty, she does not entirely believe in.
Their last night together he holds her face in his hands and she cries angry, bitter tears, because it has been a long time since she has been ashamed of them. She does not shout, she does not rage, because this was her decision too and he is hurting as well. Legolas is a knot of it, fierce and held together so tightly that he might easily break into pieces.
He holds her face, and when he kisses her it feels like goodbye, because that is exactly what it is. He says her name into her hair, he holds her so tightly that it hurts and she balls her fists into his chest.
What is forever to an elf?
She closes her eyes, and she begins to wait.
As ever, I'd absolutely love to hear from you. Have a great weekend everyone.
MyselfOnly