AUTHOR: shoneaugen
EMAIL: shoneaugen@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Ask and ye shall recieve.
FEEDBACK: Pretty pretty please?
DISCLAIMER: Legolas et al are Tolkien's. I just bring them out to play.
SUMMARY: "This is no mine. It's a tomb." [Legolas POV]
NOTES: Yes, this is based a little bit off Orlando Bloom's part in the actor commentaries (*adores new FOTR extended DVD*). Only a little. And I swear, one day I'll write something over a thousand words long. Just.. not today, apparently.
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It is the dark, he decides, dark with some extra fringe on blackness that makes him shiver out of some emotion neither cold nor fear. Beyond the flickering light of Gandalf's staff, past the edges of the Company's gaggle, there is some indeterminable emptiness that yawns and looms over his consciousness even when he pushes it to the back of his mind. He is no child, frightened by tales of things in the shadows; Mirkwood has long been shady enough in the waning age of the Firstborn that he is used to, even occasionally welcomes the dark.
This is not one of those occasions.
Two days into Moria, his nerves are fraying as a result of the dark, the complete lack of life within the stone and the close air. Sleep eludes him beyond his elven endurance's comfort, and he finds himself, while the rest of the fellowship sleep, constantly seeking anything alive within the mine walls. He finds naught but arrow-riddled corpses and long-settled dust, and he does not think he can understand how even dwarves can survive this far from open air and life and the golds and greens that dapple his surface world.
He does not know how much longer it is until they come across Balin's tomb. He knows only that it is dank, it is dark still, and the only way he keeps his sanity from wavering is by lingering at Mithrandir's side, drawn like a moth to the lit crystal that shines like some ever-dimming beacon of hope. His pretense of scouting for danger has stretched to encompass his search for some form of animation within the closing walls, ears straining to hear echoes beyond those of the Company as his vision locks on every shadow on the walls cast by their movement in the light. And he does manage to stifle a sigh of relief when he sees the beam of light cast upon the grave - manages, even, to school some expression of almost-sympathy on his face for Gimli's mourning.
Shouldn't he have known, though, that the only things that would be able to survive in this dead place would be evil? He supposes that he should have, reproaching himself with the most sharpness his flagging spirits can muster even as he cries the alarm - Orcs! Though in secret, he is more grateful to the yrch than he will ever tell, just that much more settled by seeing real movement before his eyes again.
And perhaps that is the only reason he does not completely fall apart, like the hobbits, during their last flight from the black chasms - without Mithrandir. The fractured light from open grey skies soothes his heart in hazy travesty of the crystal-bound light he'd been trailing through Moria, even in his sudden shock and confusion - death is no longer a stranger, death has come to one of the Company, and he cannot do more than Aragorn orders. True death, it seems, is that much different from lack of life, and it is only in that moment of pained new knowledge that he knows why his kin are fading back to the Undying Lands.
