I swore I would never write anything with the uncanonical movie-annalical Elves at Helm's Deep. (Haldir lives!) But this rabid plot bunny hunted me down and latched its incisors through my thigh until I relented and started writing. Also comes from reading that none of the Elves at Helm's Deep lived through the night (besides Legolas). How awful, I thought. So I wrote this.
Disclaimer: This is a work of my imagination. No copyright infringement is intended. I make no profit from this.
I am a man of Rohan, a knight of the Mark, and I will live because you will die. I shouted this till I was hoarse and all the words ran together into one ragged shout. I will live and you will die. I hung onto those words like a starving man grips bread. I can think of many prettier, more poetic things now, but that is all I could say then. They were my sanity.
I am a man of Rohan, and here I stand on the Deepening wall with the dead heaped in piles around me. There are faces that stare at me from below, pale with sunken eyes that watch me descend down to where men are raising a mound over a mass of dead men. These are faces I know, that yesterday had smiled at me, watched my back, and shouted encouragement as the Uruks came over the wall. You are dead and I live.
There are other faces here, strange, and almost blurring. They seemed real enough in the light of the mad moon last night, drenched with rain and mud and blood, but day has made them insubstantial, ethereal. These are not the faces of men. They look up with dim eyes that are ancient and weighed with much knowledge and sorrow, these Elves. You died so I may live.
If the calvary of Rohan was wiped out, the battle for Middle-earth would have been over before it was begun. That I would learn later. Today I walk unsteadily, with the knowledge of how close the Rohirrim came to loosing all, and how far we have yet to go. In the great wide world, this little horseman is nothing to the great dark that looms in the distance.
I should be sleeping, or helping to lay to rest the great piles of men rendered into so much meat. But to sleep would be to forget, and to aid the men nearby would be to remember too much, and so I wander. The sun is shining brightly but the world for me is cloaked in a grey haze. My mind meanders through the nightmare of the battle, and the events that led us here.
I stumble on a stone and come to myself somewhere along the streambed of the river. There are many Elves and orcs here, laid out on the ground and on top of each other among the shattered ruins of the wall.
I study the Elves' faces, glad I can look on them without the burden of memories, of them as laughing children, as comrades riding beside me, brothers who fell beside me under hooked blades.
We have never seen Elves. There are few left I hear. All the more surprising that they would come here, now. Their faces are slender, and beardless. I look on them as I would a herd of horses, comparing conformation. I bend down, curious, and touch a cold muddy face. "Thank you," I say, my voice shockingly loud in this place. I look into the silver eyes, trying to see a trace of something, of what and who he was. They are bright and unsettling. I watch, waiting for him to blink or the chest to move. How unstill the living are, I think when faced with an army of shells waiting for their graves.
I touch the mouth of the fellow next to him, cold and dry his lips are. His mouth is open, screaming still even though there is no breath left in his lungs. I gently push his jaw closed. "Be at peace, ancient one."
I return his sword to him. Changing my mind, I place it on his chest and cross his arms over his breast. His cloak was beaten into the earth by many feet, though I pull what is left of it from the drying mud and cover him as best I can. I do the same for the Elf next to him, and all the Elves I can reach after that, some half buried by rubble. My nails are torn and bloody and I am even more filthy than before. But at least I feel like I have done something now, for these poor beings that lived millenia only to die in the rain for people they didn't know and whose language they didn't speak.
Some of the bodies are now are truly almost invisible, leaving empty clothes and armor behind. It is beyond eerie to watch them fade away, the way they have disappeared from the land. Soon there will be nothing, and all the race of Elfkind will have left the earth, and only the fading memory of Men will be left to recall them.
I gently turn the face of an elf-man out of the mud, hoping he heard a kind word before he died, knowing his death was slow and painful. There is a deep hole left from where he had been crushed down into the earth under iron-shod orcs. His hair is caked with filth, but I pull him into my lap and try to rub the mud from his face. It comes to me suddenly that there is no skin underneath to find.
I walk down the streambed, hoping to find a place where the water comes clean. More dead stare up at me. There is a pile of bodies here, rent by orcs and heaped obscenely. I roll the bodies on top off and try to arrange them honorably till others can come. I bend down to wipe the blood from the lips of the Elf man underneath. "Be at peace soldier," I whisper as I scrub filth and blood from his mouth with my even filthier fingers. I jerked back in shock. Cautiously I reached out again and place my hand over his mouth. Could it be?
I tear at the breastplate, pulling the straps in haste. I must be mad. I press my ear to the chest. "Hoi! We have a live one down here!"
I see men scramble. A body is taken off a stretcher to make room for the living. "They are coming, Ancient One. You will be all right." His fingers twitched on his knife hilt. I wrest it from him and take his hand. "It is over now. You don't need it anymore. You are among friends. Be well." I am a Man of Rohan, and I will stay with my comrade.
They are coming, shattering the stillness and the silence of this place. The voices of the living are harsh and loud. It is a welcome sound. I lived so you will live.