He's almost done, Thranduil knows.
His fingers fly over the alloy that in a few hours will pass for skin, checking if adjustments need to be made. Every few minutes he lifts a patch of skin to show gleaming metal and tightens a screw, replaces a loose bolt, moves wiring around. The other two he tried had barely functioned, but this one will be perfect.
Thranduil never makes the same mistake twice, and he usually doesn't even make the same mistake once. The first, Adam, had been too simple, had lacked programs and processes it — for he still couldn't think of Adam as a he — needed to function. The second, Blair, was too complex, and required more energy just to run properly than Thranduil could feasibly provide.
He's been trying for a son for seven years now.
This time it'll work. It has to.
Awareness pulses under his skin, just barely out of reach; all he can sense is an overwhelming almost.
He's done. He's perfect, and he's done.
Thranduil's hands shake slightly. He forces them into stillness, takes a deep breath, and flicks a switch over Legolas's sternum.
He can't go back now.
The surface he lies on is hard and smooth and cold; the room is bright through his eyelids and smells sharp. A warm hand rests over his heart, the weight of it strangely comforting.
He opens his eyes to see a tall blond man, hair tied back, standing over him. "Hello, Legolas," says a voice that he instantly recognizes as his father's, "welcome to the world."
Legolas doesn't speak, doesn't even blink, doesn't react at all. Thranduil tries to quell the disappointment that rises in him.
"Las." He hasn't dared to say the endearment aloud yet, though he's thought it since he thought of his son's name six months ago. "Las, please, say something. Anything." Anything to let him know that Legolas was not dead before his life began, anything to tell him that he had not built another son who was born to die.
There's a silence, filled by two sets of breathing and two heartbeats, one calm and one frantic. "Please, Las." He isn't crying, not yet, but the pressure builds deep in his throat and behind his eyes and the tears will spill soon though they haven't yet.
Legolas twitches slightly. "I—father?" He pushes himself into a sitting position.
He looks and sounds more confused than anything. In his eight-year-old voice, the effect is oddly endearing.
"Is something wrong?" Legolas's head tilts to one side.
Thranduil smiles. "No, Las," he says, and means it. "Nothing's wrong." He takes Legolas's hand (it still hasn't heated up to 37*C but that should fix itself in a few hours), and Legolas gives him an answering smile — crooked and still confused and slightly hesitant but real.
Legolas shows emotion; he is not Adam, too simple to do anything but take orders.
He's been alert for several minutes now and has neither overloaded nor lost charge; he is not Blair, too complex to hold up his own mental weight.
And this might not have been how Thranduil imagined his first conversation with his son, but Legolas lives and breathes and thinks and feels.
That's all Thranduil really wanted, in the end.