~{O}~

Legolas:

It is too still in here.

Too quiet, too dusty, too echoing.

I hold onto the wall, leaning as much of my weight against it as I am able. I must escape, I cannot bear it… I cannot.

The pain is a physical presence, a part of me, intruding upon my mind and my thoughts so that all I can concentrate upon is the rawness of it; the weight, the white hot blindness. It is jagged and alive, and I hold onto my stomach as though the pain there might burst free. I can feel the line of clumsy stitches, done hastily and in fear, and I can feel wetness as well. I should not be up, I know that I should not be, but I cannot think.

It is too quiet… I am too alone in my mind. The Song is gone and I need it, I need to hear it so badly.

I am deep in stone corridors, where the Song of Iluvatar is muted and all but absent. It is dark in here, lit by candles and fire, and all that I can smell is dust and rock and sickness – cloying, sour against the back of my throat. They are healing rooms, although I am unsure as to where I am. All healing rooms smell the same, feel the same: dancing with ghosts and heavy with the smell of herbs and grief and blood.

I burn with fever, I am alive with pain, and my heart hammers in my chest until I can barely catch my breath. I must leave, I must breathe air free of this miasma… I must feel the wind and hear the Song.

I cannot remain here. I cannot stay.

My mind is a narrow point of need and fear and panic, and I take another step. One more, then another, each one blurring into the other until all I know is the need… I cannot stay here!

The smells shift, the sounds change, and I am not so far gone that I do not notice.

There is a room to my right, and I pause to decide how I might bridge this gap without the wall there to steady me. I must keep going, because there must be an end to this terrible silence… there must be a way out, there must be a sky and stars and air somewhere at the end of this.

There is a woman in the room, lying straight and still in her bed. Her body is wasted, as frail as kindling, and I have never seen anything so frightening before. I can see every bone beneath gossamer-fine skin, her face barely distinguishable over the clear outline of her skull. Her eyes are closed, sunken, her mouth open and every breath that whispers past her lips comes to me with the smell of death.

She lives, although I cannot see how. I have never seen one so old before, never seen the passage of years cause such terrible damage… I had not known it possible. The world tilts and skews, I hear a roaring in my ears but I find focus. I stand shivering and quaking, heaving for breath, but I cannot stop looking.

Snow fine hair wisps across a pink scalp, her hands are gnarled and twisted, held carefully by two women at her bedside. They are sisters, even I can see the relation between them. One is older and taller, and one is younger and broader, but they both have the same sad grey eyes, the same reddish hair.

They sit silently, they do not move or speak, and they watch. They hold their mother's hand, a grieving vigil, and they wait for the gentle breaths to stop.

It is awful. I feel their grief as though it is a physical weight, but it is also peaceful. Dignified. I can feel the grief and I can smell the sickness, I can taste it, but their love… it is choking me.

One of them moves, a graceful and small thing, and she brushes her mother's hair with a moth gentle touch. She sees me – a ghost at the door – and she smiles.

There is someone there, then, and I feel my weight taken in strong hands. It is good, because I cannot bear it by myself any longer. The pain, the sickness and grief, the shades of mortality all hammer against my weakened fëa, denied the air and the sun and Song. I hear my name as the roaring in my ears becomes deafening, as my vision fades, but I know that smell: steel and campfire smoke, wet soil and horse.

Estel.

I am a fool, he tells me, in a voice tight with annoyance and fear. I am a stubborn fool, and then a whole stream of more unpleasant names. I do not catch them all, my mind is a haze and so I find it difficult to understand this tongue of theirs; I must concentrate upon it at the best of times. When I finally lose my legs his tone softens. He helps me to the ground, props me against the wall and rests cool hands upon my brow, then he calls me a fool again but he sounds less like he means it.

I must have closed my eyes because he tells me to open them. He tells me more than once, and I obey only because I cannot stand the hint of fear that creeps into his tone. I have never been able to deny him, never been able to stand him being frightened.

I try to speak, try to tell him that I cannot stay here. I try to tell him of the silence and how terrible it is – how I cannot bear another moment of the smell and the heaviness of this awful place. I try to tell him but the words are thick and stupid upon my tongue. I choke upon them and pain spikes like hot coals... I gasp and I try to breathe through it, but it does not fade.

"We have made a litter for you outside," he tells me, his voice muffled and distant. "I am sorry my friend, I did not think you would wake so soon. Breathe easy, be peaceful… please, I cannot stand to see you this way."

And I try… for him I try. He is so young, barely twenty, and right now he is a frightened boy.

I picture the sun, the wind, the sky. I close my mind to the weight of the stone that crushes the Song out of the air and I try not to breathe the sickness. I shut it all out, and I try.

When I close my eyes this time, all that I see is the scrap of humanity upon that bed, breathing the last of her moments, and the sadness of her daughter's smile. It follows me into darkness.

~~{O}~~

Aragorn:

Legolas still walks tentatively, gingerly, his hand protective about his stomach, but he is upright and mostly himself again after so many weeks – too many, far longer than it should have taken for an elf to heal.

The autumn sun is low and it turns his hair shades of fire, his skin a pale gold. His breath plumes white against the thin light – steady and slow – and I watch for a while, because it has become habit to me now. I have spent whole nights watching him breathe, ensuring each one is followed by another… watching until my eyes burned in exhaustion, until my hands shook for want of sleep.

I have been so very afraid for him.

He steps from one tussock of grass to another, light footed and silent, as though it is a game. The ground is black and wet, the path that we follow is lit in thick bands of fire red sunlight, sparkling through rain on forest grass and curled brown ferns. The trees are red and yellow, auburn and brown, and some are already bare.

I have a bag at my waist and I stop frequently. I use my boots to pry apart the jagged, spiked husks of chestnuts littering the floor, hiding amongst the sodden leaf-fall and clustered tightly amongst the tree roots. I duck often, rich brown chestnuts falling into the damp bag upon my belt. Soil sticks to my hands and I wipe them across my trouser leg, stretching back to release the ache that is starting to form between my shoulders.

I pause and stretch, squinting against red sunlight, and I breathe deeply; cold air, thick with the scent of leaf mould and the forest in the autumn. Legolas is quiet today… far too quiet. He is uninterested in picking chestnuts, but he followed me out here anyway. I do not know why he has followed me if he is not going to speak.

He knows that I am watching him, and he turns to me. He is further ahead and so I can barely see his face, the light is too bright, but I see it catch pink in the delicate points of his ears, red and gold in his hair. He tilts his head, a birdlike movement, and I do not need to see his face to read what it says. Legolas is difficult to read at times, but I have known him my whole life and so I can tell just in the way that he is standing.

"You are in a strange mood," I accuse, dropping my cold bitten hands back to my sides. I tease at the bag, letting the chestnuts roll against one another like river pebbles, and he moves away so that the sun no longer blinds me. There is an odd quirk to his mouth, a strangeness to the look in his eyes as he dances to the side of the road again. It is higher there, a bank of stone and earth, and he jumps easily atop it but his hand rests at his stomach again. I wonder whether it has become a habit or whether he is truly pained – his movements do not seem any less fluid, any less graceful, but Legolas is well used to hiding such things.

"Does it not frighten you, Estel?" he asks, and I sigh. Legolas has a habit of resuming conversations weeks after we started them, and I am not yet practised enough to keep track. I look closer, I see the haunted look that ghosts behind his eyes and I recognise it… the confusion and sadness. I have seen that look before. Glints and glimmers, my whole life, I have seen it.

"You speak of the old woman?"

I do not need to ask again. He says nothing but I know that I am correct. He speaks of our mortality, of the ever coming darkness that is at the end of my days. He does not understand… he has never been able to understand.

"No more than I fear the coming of night," I shrug, and I resume my hunt in the leaves. "I am still young Legolas, it is a distant thing to me, but my mother says that there is little use in being afraid."

He snorts. I do not think that he believes me; that perhaps I am making light of things or pretending at bravery, and I straighten again. There is a light frown across his brow, faint and unhappy.

"Legolas," I say softly, and he looks at me. I hold his gaze long enough for him to know I speak the truth; that I am not simply saying what he wishes to hear, or perhaps what I am supposed to say. "I do not fear it, my friend. I think that perhaps one day I will welcome it, and if it does not come to me in old age, then all I fear is a poor ending."

This, at least, he understands, and he nods.

I recall these last weeks – of the night he came to us, torn apart and in bloody tatters. I recall my own fear, and I see again my hands covered in his blood. I hear my own panicked breathing, see clumsy and slow hands shaking as I stitched him back together again. Such fear… such terrible fear, watching and waiting for each rise and fall of his chest. Lord Elrond has taught me of healing, taught me since before I first learned my letters, but it is the first time that I have had to stitch together someone that is so dear to me. The first time that I have done it alone, and I think perhaps I can still feel his blood on my hands. I wipe them against my trouser leg again.

Legolas will never truly die, but if he passes into Mandos' keeping then he and I will never meet again. I cannot recall any day in my life when there was no Legolas – he has been there since my earliest memories. He has taught me and consoled me, carried me to my bed when I was very small. He has reprimanded me, we have played games and spoken long into the night. If I lose him, it is the same as a mortal death to me, and I understand his fear all too well. I feel the recent echoes of it all too keenly.

I try to think of something wise to say. I try to imagine what Elrond might say, or even my mother, but I come up blank. It is not often that I have had to settle the heart of an elf, to provide comfort when I have always been the one to require it, but I cannot think of anything wise. I am Estel and not Elrond, and instead I simply tell him the truth.

"I think that you fear it more than I do," I tell him, and I try to make my tone lighter… try to pull him from this morbid mood of his. I am rewarded with a smile, although it is a sad one, and he sighs.

"I think perhaps you are right," he admits.

"You will be sailed by then, my friend. Or perhaps I will have finally found you too aggravating to speak to, and we will be friends no longer. Perhaps I will have strangled you."

This time when he snorts it is a more familiar sound, and it says quite plainly that I am welcome to try. I turn my tone again, I put the smallest hint of childishness into it, of pleading. He has never been able to deny me anything I have asked of him when I use this tone.

"We have few years together Legolas by your own say so, but although it is a heartbeat to you, to me it is a lifetime. Let us not speak of the end so soon."

He sighs again but he nods, and I can see the moment in which he shakes free of his musings. He attempts a smile – a real one – and although there is a faint echo of sadness there, he manages it quite well. It is soft and bright, golden in the sunlight, and I feel a weight fall free from my shoulders. The relief makes me feel guilty.

I will have to get better at this, I think.

He reaches one hand down to me, I reach up and he grasps my frozen hand with one that is bafflingly warm. There is a struggle as he pulls me up onto the narrow bank; it is steep and high, and I am only a man, but once we are stood together it is worth the embarrassment of my scrabbling and stumbling.

The path drops away into a steep hill, and we are at its summit. We are high enough to see the fall ahead of us, autumn gold and ice sharp. It winds away into forever, or so it seems, and I can see forested hills and valleys stretching away endlessly.

Mist pools in the lower parts, and the higher places burn with light. The whole of Arda is laid out before us, wrapped around us, winding behind us… a whole world. My feet itch, and for a moment I wish nothing more than to simply keep walking and not return. Not until I have seen it all.

A bird calls, bright and sharp, and I put my hands to my hips, a grin stretching unbidden across my face.

"Well," I huff white into the morning. "Isn't that a thing…"

Legolas and I catch one another's gaze, and this time his smile is completely natural and free of any darkness. I see it all in that look of his: the wildness and wanderlust, the call of the hidden places – it runs through him, burns in his veins, and I can feel it too. It washes free all of the fear I have felt for him, all of the last weeks that cling to my heart like shadows, and for a moment we understand one another perfectly. I watch him for a while, even after he returns his attention to the forest, because I never tire of seeing my friend this way.

This… this Legolas, the wild and alive one, he slowly replaces the one that has caught and burned into my mind. Hurt and insensible with pain and fever, scrabbling against the stone to escape. It has frightened me, I have never imagined that I might lose him before now, and suddenly everything is so much more precious and urgent.

I do not have forever. I was not born with an eternity ahead of me and so there will never be enough time. Not with my friends, not to see it all, but I have a lifetime and I am willing to try. If the days that I am granted are spent filled with moments like this one – moments of beauty and endless freedom, with a friend by my side – then I have no fear of them ending.

I have no fear at all.

END

Veeeeery slightly less cheerful than yesterday's offering, but still kinda hopeful and hey - Aragorn! I wrote young Aragorn. Go me :)

Not too much rambling today, but I really hope you have enjoyed the second part of the birthday celebrations for 'Silence. If you liked it, please just let me know. I love hearing from you all.

Thanks go to Lindir's Ghost for the beta. I've been writing from Gimli's point of view for so long now that I do struggle speaking as Legolas or Aragorn. She spotted all of my Gimli-isms so I could fix them :)

Tomorrow we will see the Three Hunters reunited, and they will have a bit of a celebration themselves!

Have a great weekend :)

MyselfOnly