Author's note: Written in honor of this year's vernal equinox. Dates in this story are based in our Gregorian calendar, interpreted very simply based on approximations Tolkien gave us in the Appendices. If Frodo left the Shire in October of the last year of the Third Age, and the Fourth Age started thereafter, then this story takes place approximately five months after the last of the Ringbearers departed Middle-earth. If you are interested at all in Middle-earth calendars, there is a great article online by Boris Shapiro ("The Calendars of Imladris, Gondor, and the Shire, and their adaptation for Gregorian Reckoning") that expands on Tolkien's work that I would recommend. (A birth date is not given for Aragorn and Arwen's first child, Eldarion, and there are conflicting statements as to whether Eomer and Lothiriel were married in the last year of the Third Age or the first year of the Fourth; so, in this story, I have placed both events in the same year—unimportant, but, to me, worth acknowledging.)
Until the Parting of Ways
March 20th, Year 1, Fourth Age of the Sun
Minas Tirith, Gondor
Gimli fastened his belt and ran his fingers several times through his recently washed beard. He plaited the whole thing loosely and quickly, and then secured the coarse hair at the base of his neck with a thick silver clasp that, Legolas had told him the day before, made his hair sprawl across his wide back like a chestnut burst open in late fall. Gimli thought Legolas was accurate in that his hair was, perhaps, the color of chestnuts, but he did not care to understand what Legolas meant by the rest of it, just as Legolas feigned ignorance when Gimli compared his head to a fine chunk of rhyolite.
Gimli pushed open the door to his quarters and set off to find beer and Aragorn and then later, perhaps—if he could be called in from whatever he was doing out of doors—the elf.
It was late afternoon as Gimli walked down the corridor that was edged with windows that opened onto the west side of the citadel. He had spent the better part of his day split between the library stacks, the stonemasons' quarters, and the second level of the city. Several of his kin would arrive in a few days, and he wanted to be prepared to review immediately his design plans for the new barracks and stables, and thus begin renewing those now weathering ruins of the War's wrath.
Gimli and his kin and the men of the city had replaced, in the years after the war, the gates with mithril-work and rebuilt the metalworks on the lowest level, and then repaired the market level (the third). But now it was time to return to the simple things—foot soldiers and their horses, things Gimli had come to know well, and to love. Soldiers and horses deserved perhaps the most noble housing, but a city is driven by its economy, Gimli knew, and other things—in these easier days—came first.
That morning, however—in this third Spring since the War—Gimli had discovered the barracks and stables twisted through with last summer's dried vines and overrun by thin sprouts of green and yellow, tiny leaves turned toward the sun like open hands. The nubile leaves were pretty, Gimli thought, and poetic, he imagined Legolas would think, but the vines were hardy and well-enmeshed, and he did not have patience for them while clambering among the rocks to locate the stables' original central supports—the vines stuck to the fallen roof's rotting wood like leaches, and they wrapped round debris like a whip cracked round a limb. He had traded a young boy a measuring tape for a message and sent him to the upper levels to find Legolas, knowing he would come for the bribe he had bid the boy communicate—fresh bread, sharp cheese, and growing green things—in exchange for identifying the plants and instructing Gimli on the best way to remove them.
Legolas had appeared at Gimli's shoulder less than an hour later—they were still so very different, but they knew each other so very well, Gimli had thought to himself then, amused at Legolas' predictability—and then he sat heavily on a rough cut of sandstone by Gimli's feet and looked up at Gimli with innocence, hands held out expectantly. Gimli laughed deeply and shoved a bundled half-loaf of bread and a block of cheese into the elf's chest.
Legolas rocked back on the stone at the intrusion, but then caught the bundle up in his long hands and folded his legs in a diamond in front of him. He unfolded the handkerchief on the rock so that its corners lay like an opened flower on his knee, his hip, and pointing towards the ground on two sides like a wilting crocus. Then, Legolas cut a thick slice of cheese with a knife Gimli had not seen him produce, tore off a chunk of bread and nimbly pressed at the center of it until a hole emerged, slid the cheese into the center of the bread and smashed it between the palms of his hands to make the bread smaller, and then took a large bite.
"Well?" Legolas had asked, looking up at Gimli and pointing at him with his food before setting it in front of himself on the rock. He ran his hands down his legs to remove the crumbs, and swallowed roughly with a hand over his mouth, as if that politeness excused his silent and unrefined entrance into Gimli's morning (it did). "What growing thing have you found? And found the need already to get rid of!"
"These vines, my friend," Gimli had said, pulling at a dried and shedding length near his feet.
"Oh, that is Traveller's Joy," Legolas said distractedly, folding up the bread and cheese and tucking it in a bundle between two small stones.
Gimli watched Legolas as he rocked forward onto his knees and let his feet fall to the sandstone behind him. He leaned forward and reached for the vine by Gimli's boots and ran his fingers along it. He pulled his small knife out again—this time from a slit in the leather belt at his waist—and cut it at the place his fingers had touched. He traced it toward the sandstone on which he sat, where it had crawled and coiled last season, and cut it again at its base. He then took up the bundle of bread again and wrapped the vine around the package, crisscross crisscross, before quickly tying it off with a loose knot and looping bow.
Legolas looked up at Gimli.
"We use it for rope in Ithilien, and string," he said. "You get rid of it by cutting it for use; it comes back year after year no matter how much you cast out. We could start, perhaps, a rope business, you and I."
"And this?" Gimli asked, pointing at the tiny green leaves that seemed to rejoice as the sun rose higher in the sky.
"That is honeysuckle, the wild climbing kind," Legolas said, tapping the nearest tiny leaf with a finger, and then raising his hands palm up as if he too were a leaf. Face turned to the sun, he smiled.
Gimli sighed.
"And how do I get rid of that, O fearsome warrior of Mirkwood?"
"It can be cut, as well, or one may dig it up and move it elsewhere—its roots are not as deep as some others," Legolas said, looking back at the dwarf and shrugging. "It will come back, though, as well. It endures."
"As does stone," Gimli said thoughtfully, stomping on the crumbling clay bricks beneath his feet, and then stepping onto a stretch of stronger sandstone for comfort; he felt the quartz and feldspar rumble through him like a gentle earthquake, warming him from head to boot.
"As do we all," Legolas said, smiling again and standing.
He clapped Gimli on the shoulder and the dwarf looked up at him with his arms crossed over his broad chest.
"You sent that boy all the way to the citadel so that I might tell you the name of a few plants?" Legolas asked. "He very well may have told you himself. Traveller's Joy, at least, is not known to Mirkwood—I might not have known it."
Gimli laughed. "Legolas, I saw you carrying this fool vine into the city two springs past, out of Ithilien, to give life to this place, you said. Of course you would know what it was."
"Yes, well," said Legolas, "You are right. But I did not plant it here. It was brought here on the wind, I think, by its feathery seeds, drawn maybe to the scent of the soldiers' horses, and their rich waste."
Gimli raised an eyebrow. Legolas had dropped his hand from Gimli's shoulder and had both of them instead on his hips.
"And the honeysuckle, then?" Gimli asked. "The wind brought that here, too?"
"Oh no, that I planted here myself, the summer after the War, before we had even left Minas Tirith for our homes."
"Why did you do that?" Gimli asked, with sincere interest.
"It smelt still of death so close to the fields, and the horses stunk, yet children ran through the streets without shoes, throwing broken arrows at each other like toys, braided their hair and tied it back with bits of cloth, played at funerals—for the houses they had lost and the friends that had wandered off during the siege but never returned."
Legolas' voice was soft and his eyes looked out down the street to where two children sat in the road, painting designs on the side of a house with brushes of self-fashioned horsehair, paint from ochre crushed beneath their own tiny hands, mixed with water—their bodies were more painted than even the wall.
Gimli smiled fondly as he watched them, too.
"It smelt of war and death, and yet children danced amongst it. Nothing was green, nothing grew. I could not do anything to mend their hearts of those losses, but I could give them a sweet smell of summer, planted in the fertile waste of the horses in this crumbling place."
"Children are strong, Legolas," Gimli said, patting his friend on the small of his back. "They are surprising, like hobbits."
Legolas smiled, at some memory of the hobbits, Gimli supposed.
"Aye, they will endure. And the honeysuckle will, too!" Legolas said. "I would suggest pulling it up now before it grows more, so that its roots will not fight the upheaval. It will come back if it can, like these children of men."
Gimli laughed. "Aye, like the children of men."
Legolas bent to pick up his now neatly tied bundle of bread. He tossed it into the air once and caught it; he then looked at Gimli. Gimli tucked his beard into his tunic and spoke.
"Go back to whatever you were doing, bird. I will send for you if I come across any more of your hidden green mischief."
"Fair enough," Legolas said, jumping lightly from the sandstone down the pile of rubble to the street. "Enjoy your morning, Gimli."
"And you yours," Gimli replied, nodding.
And then Gimli turned back to staring at the mess of rock and vine, and Legolas was off down the street, pausing to admire the children's art and to break them each a piece of bread, and then he was away up the level like a spring breeze.
Now, on the seventh level of the city, a spring breeze buffeted Gimli as a bird flew unsteadily overhead and cast its shadow on his path. He took a left at the citadel guards' barracks so that he came round the corner to the back entrance of Aragorn's family quarters. Usually, a guard would have stepped respectfully out of his way by then, for they guarded even the most obscure entrances to King Elessar, but today there was no guard in the empty garden behind Aragorn and Arwen's rooms. Today, Gimli saw—only mildly surprised—there was only Legolas.
Legolas sat in the middle of the bare greenspace outside the King's soon-to-be nursery, bent over a piece of flattened parchment with a reed pen in hand. There were several more sheets of parchment held down by rocks in a line in front of him, as well as a pot of ink. About the yard were several lengths of string, thin cuts of timber, hammer, pegs, a saw, flowerpots, the bundle of bread and cheese, a shovel and hoe, and Legolas' shoes.
"I am not sure we live in the same world, my friend," Gimli said from where he stood at the edge of the sprawling disaster.
"I am quite sure that we do," Legolas said, not looking up from the parchment he was bent over. "I am yet in Middle-earth and so are you, or is it not so?"
He drew a long thick line on the parchment and glanced back up toward the wall in front of him, and then drew a second decisive line. Legolas laid down the pen and looked up at Gimli.
Gimli raised his eyebrows as a lock of hair fell heavily from the knot—Gimli was fairly sure it was actually a knot—at the base of Legolas' neck. It swung about his face for a moment before twisting like a living thing, for even elves had cowlicks, and fell heavily to dangle between Legolas' eyes. The elf tucked it behind an ear and then raised his eyebrows, too, waiting for an answer to his rhetorical question.
"We are both still in Middle-earth, aye," Gimli finally agreed.
"People sometimes leave here."
"They sometimes do."
Legolas was quiet again and watched Gimli carefully. Gimli folded his arms across his chest and nudged one of the flowerpots with the toe of his boot. Legolas watched the way the cool wind pulled at Gimli's chestnut hair and ruffled his eyebrows. Then, there was a heavy-bodied dragonfly; it was tugged by the wind and hovered for a moment several feet above and to the left of Gimli's head. Gimli turned around to see that at which Legolas stared, and the dragonfly swayed in the breeze and then was freed—it zipped away and over the wall at the dwarf's sudden movement.
Gimli saw Legolas' eyes follow it for several moments as it dipped and hovered, before his gaze turned back to the dwarf. Legolas pulled a rock from his pocket with which to anchor his most recent sketch, then capped the ink and suddenly spoke.
"I think Frodo left because he did too much for Middle-earth, and I stay, maybe, because I have not yet done enough. Sauron is gone, yes, but it is still not enough."
He held Gimli's brown eyes—like muddy water cut through with sunlight, Legolas thought vaguely, but roiling in their depths, like rapids—with his own gaze. To Gimli it looked like Legolas was maybe bemused, or enchanted, as when he had seen the gulls for the first time, or the Ents—there was the sorrow there of something gained and something lost, the cyclical 'not enough' of it all.
Legolas' gaze flickered down to the anchored paper momentarily, and then caught Gimli again with such suddenness that the dwarf felt he was caught mid-fall. Legolas tilted his head back so he could see Gimli's face fully, and his eyebrows knit in consideration.
"So, Gimli, what then is enough?" Legolas asked. "When there is no more pain in this world, is that enough? Or is it enough when we have become too tired from it and must finally leave—death or fading or crossing the sea, whatever leaving means to us? Is it enough—when our friends tire of Arda and leave us to live on the land they once loved—to love that land for them? Is that enough? Or is it only enough if we make it better than it once was?"
Gimli fingered the tuft of hair at the tip of his beard's braid and waited for Legolas to finish; sometimes being friends with the elf was exhausting, but he imagined Legolas thought the same of him. As expected, Legolas continued.
"I do not know the answer, and neither, I think, do the Elves. Do you and your folk?"
Gimli dropped to the ground near his friend and crossed his legs in front of him, sweeping away a ball of twine with one hand as he did so, so he could lean back unobstructed.
"Are you well, Legolas?"
"Yes, of course."
"You speak strangely."
Legolas laughed and his eyes were suddenly clear again, his face as expressively tempestuous as Belfalas' summer storms.
"I am only thinking, friend Gimli."
Gimli humphed and sighed and adjusted his heavy, tooled belt—it was reassuring under his fingers. He watched Legolas watching him and finally shrugged.
"Then I shall think with you," Gimli said. "For you ask heavy questions."
Legolas seemed satisfied with Gimli's answer, and he dropped his head into his hands and cradled his chin, watching thin clouds race each other across the sky not far above the city's walls. Gimli took up the twine and began to reroll the ball of it, for it had come loose and unraveled messily into a pile when he earlier knocked it aside. Legolas was singing to himself, and Gimli thought that, perhaps, that meant they were now moved on to less weighty topics than how to make life meanginful after the War. The dwarf could not know, however, that Legolas sang of the Anduin and chasing it down to the sea, for the words were sung softly and in the elf's own tongue, and his eyes were fixed on the clouds and did not betray his inner turmoil.
Just as Gimli felt himself begin to relax, Legolas stopped singing, and spoke.
"You have moved my pots."
Gimli jumped slightly and turned his eyes toward Legolas.
"I wish you had not moved the pots."
"I did not move your precious flowerpots, wood-elf," Gimli said, sighing.
"You did. You nudged them with your boot earlier, as we spoke. But they were sat just so, and they served a purpose."
Gimli stared at Legolas as if he had suddenly begun to speak Entish.
"To mark the edge of the garden," Legolas clarified, scratching lightly at the side of his nose with one curled finger as he observed Gimli's reaction.
Gimli frowned. Truly, he and Legolas sometimes still did not understand one another, but he had never before actually thought the elf daft. Gimli spoke slowly out of concern.
"Legolas, there is no garden here for them to mark the edges of."
To Gimli's surprise, Legolas laughed jovially and threw his hands into the air before leaning toward Gimli, still smiling. Gimli thought maybe he had lost his mind, or was teasing him, or maybe partook in some wood-elf plant ritual of which he had not yet been enlightened. Whatever the case, Gimli was irritated.
"Oh, Gimli, there is no garden here yet!" Legolas shook his head. "Whatever did you think I drew these pictures for?"
"I do not question your motives for doodling."
"I have been measuring the shadows since the sun breached the walls this morning—a new drawing made each time the sun travelled a length of my hand. I would have the garden full of flowers and vegetables for Aragorn and Arwen's child to learn to tend over the years, and they will not grow best—nor some of them come back each year as intended—if I do not plan the garden well."
Gimli looked anew at the items spread out before them, and Legolas' strange logic was suddenly less strange, the apparent randomness of the things suddenly took order in the dwarf's mind. Legolas saw things differently than he did, Gimli reminded himself, but that did not mean the elf was always wrong, nor as ignorant as Gimli sometimes—he was ashamed to admit—still thought him. It was hard for Gimli to reconcile the wild ferocity of Legolas' warfare with the tenderness with which he nurtured growing things, and the joy that shone from him with an embarrassing lack of restraint when he did so.
"It is Echuir," Legolas continued, bringing Gimli out of his thoughts. "It is the time of year when night and day are almost exactly the same in length. It is the best day to plan and to bless those plans, I guess, though I have started it all too late, I think—we cannot plant for quite a while more in the North, and everything else I have planted in this city has been brought straight from the forest, and easy, thus, to figure into the seasons."
Legolas pointed at one of the drawings from earlier in the day as Gimli began to speak.
"See," Legolas said, "how the western edge will be best for plants that require—"
"The night and day are today the same length," Gimli murmured.
Legolas looked at him, uncomprehendingly.
"Yes, that is what I said. Why do you repeat it?"
A door opened behind them and Aragorn emerged, walking toward them with a pitcher of water in hand and a forgotten ledger tucked under his arm. He was weary from a long day at work, but as elf and dwarf turned to him in one fluid motion, Aragorn smiled brightly.
"What is this I hear? Quarreling!" Aragorn exclaimed. "Have you started the merriment without me?"
"Nay," Gimli said, patting Legolas on the shoulder as he leapt to his feet. "Legolas is only drawing pictures of the wall, and he is neither an architect nor an artist, so you have missed absolutely nothing, my friend."
Legolas smiled at him as Aragorn sat down.
"Where is Arwen?" Gimli asked.
"She is with Lothíriel," said Legolas. "They discuss how to blend Gondorian and Rohirrim traditions for her marriage to Éomer."
Aragorn raised an eyebrow.
"I only observed them walking together, while I sat here earlier today. I do not spy on your wife, Aragorn!" Legolas said, laughing.
"Yes, well," Aragorn said. "Legolas is right, though I do not know exactly where she is, so we must be somewhat quiet this evening in case they plan in the baby's rooms."
"Nay. I heard them say they would pass the evening in the room off the Feasting Hall, the one with the red couches," said Legolas. "It is far from here, is it not?"
"It is," Aragorn said, smiling slightly and inclining his head.
"So, tell us of your day, Aragorn! For we know of one another's," Gimli redirected.
"No, Gimli. I do not want to talk of my day as Elessar," he said. "I want to sit here with you as Aragorn, as Strider—as one of the three hunters, as the last of our Fellowship remaining here east of the Misty Mountains, just as friends and companions, not as King and lords or King and company."
Legolas looked up sharply as he twirled the reed pen between his fingers. Aragorn was in a mood, he could tell. There were too many people in moods in one place for the evening to end merrily. He resolved to try his best to be quiet and follow his friends' lead, perhaps buoy any unexpected turns in emotion with 'obnoxious exuberance,' as Gimli once called his enthusiasm.
"Fair enough," said Gimli. "We will talk together as great friends, and comfort one another in Frodo and Gandalf's passing—"
"And Elrond's."
"—and Elrond's," repeated Gimli, nodding to Aragorn and placing a gentle hand on his forearm. "And our Lady of the Golden Wood," he said, touching a locket now at his chest as he spoke of Galadriel, "and in our knowledge that our time as a Fellowship has long ended, and our time as the three hunters was short, and as three friends is only a little less so. We must comfort each other in this passage of time—"
"The passing of an age—" Aragorn added.
"Yes," Gimli agreed.
Legolas frowned and flipped his reed pen into the air, catching it by the tip, and then he tucked it behind an ear.
"The passing of an age, maybe, but also the coming of a dear friend's new child!" he interjected after a moment. "We can also comfort one another with the knowledge that our lives continue on and know that every time the sun rises this side of the sea, it is ever a new chance for joy!"
"Indeed," said Aragorn seriously. "But as with joy, each day is also a chance for grief, and we do not talk of that enough. And to keep it so quiet for so long when so much has been lost—it darkens hearts."
"Aye," said Gimli, and Legolas hmmed.
"We will talk, and we will drink, but above all, the three of us will endure."
"Until the parting of ways," said Gimli
Legolas nodded but was silent. He looked at his friends with a tilted head, honey hair catching in the wind and twisting in front of his face as he narrowed his eyes, not quite ready to concede.
The Ringbearers had left when the leaves fell, before the winter, and it was now becoming spring—they had contemplated each, alone, throughout the winter, in their own separate lands, in silence, but now they were to take comfort from one another, as if their friends left only yesterday?
It was amusing and absurd and mortal and good.
Legolas frowned again and looked down, and then smiled, and finally shook his head and raised his face to his friends'. The elf laughed quietly, and then there was a half smile and sparkling bright eyes when he spoke.
"Very well. Until the parting of ways, then."
Aragorn and Gimli met one another's gaze as Legolas stood and began to collect his strings and papers; Aragorn smiled slightly and Gimli grinned triumphantly—with that acknowledgement, the cap on the evening had broken. Legolas stacked his things neatly under the window and weighed down the papers again with a rock.
Then Gimli noticed for the first time the delicate trellis Legolas had built by the nursery window—thin curved saplings and a few dried sticks, tied together with twine and woven across with it, too—and the clump of wild honeysuckle the elf must have carried in from the forest and planted there earlier in the day.
"I would not want any fool dwarf spilling ale on my hard work," Legolas teased, stabbing a hole in the ground by each flowerpot to mark where they had been.
He stacked the pots and held them in his hands as he pushed the timbers away with his bare feet in an odd and rather unsophisticated shuffle. Legolas sat the pots down at the far wall and turned back around to Gimli and Aragorn, hands on his hips.
"Well, Aragorn, if we are to endure, and if I am to endure an evening of philosophizing with the two of you, I require some wine."
"All right," said Aragorn.
"And I some ale, to steady my head as I follow this one's meandering thoughts," Gimli added gruffly.
Aragorn laughed.
"And I too will need some, to spend any more time at all with either of the two of you!"
With that, Aragorn dipped back into his rooms to fetch a bottle of wine and flagon of beer, and Gimli plucked Legolas' pen out of his hair to examine it. Legolas untied the knot on the bread and cheese and lay it in the middle of their small circle, before scrambling up the steep wall that had held his attention for so much of the day. He stood tall with his arms spread to his sides like wings, his palms turned toward the fading sun, as if directing its rays.
"I can make you a better pen than this one," said Gimli. "One that will last you longer."
"I would appreciate that," Legolas called back. "But it will last, I think—if you do not want to make one—long enough."
"It will," Gimli agreed, "but I can make it better."
Aragorn was back and then Legolas was down the wall and sat with his knees crossed in front of him, bumping up against Gimli's, as Aragorn dumped several ceramic mugs on the grass and began pouring wine and beer, offering his friends dried meat and nuts, as if he were yet a ranger.
Gimli picked up his drink and Legolas did the same, and then Aragorn.
Yes, Gimli thought, they would endure. At least for a while—long enough—until it was the time of men, and he had passed, and Legolas sailed away. But until then, they would endure in this place, with these people and the land they loved, they would endure well enough—even celebrate—day after day, until the end of days.
He had only had a sip of ale and he was already having sentimental 'beer thoughts.' It was the heady smell of the hops, Gimli told himself, that brought on the mood, not a weakness of character. He smiled into his mug.
Aragorn laughed at something Gimli had not heard Legolas say, and then Legolas' fair face was marked with confusion and sadness, and Aragorn placed an arm around his shoulders as Gimli watched.
"The equinox is about balance, Legolas," said Aragorn. "To endure and then bloom. To bring forth a new spring, we all must grieve."
Gimli sipped at his beer and watched Aragorn's face as he implored, speaking the words perhaps more to himself than to the ageless elf between them. Legolas turned to Aragorn and no longer looked confused, but instead, in his own peculiar way of expressing it, rather irritated—eyebrows knit, head tilted, lips slightly parted and shoulders tense.
"You think I have not lived long enough to yet know that, Aragorn?"
Aragorn recoiled and pulled his arm from the elf's taught muscles, though Gimli thought that Legolas probably had not intended to be so caustic. Legolas knew himself—of the three of them—perhaps least of all.
Gimli sighed and opened his mouth to speak—Legolas and Aragorn needed a dwarf to steady them.
And so their evening began. They endured the grief through the night.
Their grief: How it was that Frodo was broken by the ring, disenchanted finally with Middle-earth—Legolas fell silent when Gimli spoke of that sadness—how it was, to them, like Frodo had died when he left Middle-earth, how alone Sam might now feel with the loss of him, that only living person in the world who had stood at the crack of Mount Doom at the end of days—Legolas thought maybe he and Gimli should visit.
How Gandalf, who had been a mentor to all at one point or another, was returned to the West, and how Legolas alone would be the only one of them to perhaps see him again.
How Lorien fell now into the disintegrating stream of mortal time and its wood-elves would one day fade into nothing; how Aragorn ruminated on his elven friends' fates; how Legolas would endure the passing of his dearest friends and then the final passage, in one form or another, of the elves.
They spoke of how Elrond would never know his grandchildren, nor Galadriel her kin; how Aragorn and Arwen would raise their children without their own families, bereft of the wisdom of those that had helped to raise them; how Arwen would bring this child into the world in Gondor, without Imladrian healers, or Noldorin blessings spoken from the lips of her fathers' elves.
They mourned that there was darkness yet in the world after the passing of evil, and how there would ever be darkness in their hearts and in the lands for which they had labored so long, even with this dawning of a new age and the imminent arrival of a new generation.
They spoke of it all.
Though the Ringbearers had left Middle-earth months ago, this coming of spring, the lengthening of days, the closer they came to meeting this baby—it was the season for growing and renewal, and the grief—like a calf sickening its ailing mother—was finally born.
And it was good.
Every once in a while, in the grief, there were moments of clear laughter, and Gimli would be lying if he did not admit he felt better for baring and confronting those fears, and when Legolas stood with the breaking of the sun to scramble up the wall as if some mighty weight had been lifted from him—from all of them—so that he felt truly light, not just feigning merriment and slipping a mask over stubborn grief, Gimli knew they had endured unto the breaking of a new day.
Legolas stood on the wall as he had the night before, his arms spread to the side and his head tilted back in the dim light, absolutely quiet. Aragorn ran a hand over his face; he slapped his hands on his thighs as he stood and then gathered up the cups and bottles in the now empty handkerchief. It was with a lightened heart that Gimli reproachfully sent Aragorn in to bathe and tidy before he held court, and that the dwarf tossed the elf's shoes at him, hitting Legolas squarely between the shoulder blades with one of them.
"Come!" Gimli said. "We have contemplated enough, and you have much to do with this mess," he gestured at the empty garden and sundry tools, "before Aragorn's child comes to this world. My kin will be here before long, and this deplorable excuse for a garden needs more of your honeysuckle. Let us go find some."
Legolas stood quietly, watching the city, as Gimli spoke to him, but he finally turned with a small smile.
"What a strange friend I have in you," he said, tilting his head to the side. "So…accommodating."
Then Legolas pivoted on the balls of his feet and jumped to the ground. He pulled on his shoes quickly, and as he straightened up, he clapped his hands together.
"Let us go find some of that wild stuff then! I will build our friend's child a wild sanctuary that will endure as the child grows, and then I will help you to cut out those vines and move, if you need it, some stone."
Legolas took off away from the garden and around the corner, spinning on the balls of his feet to laugh and wave to Gimli as he waited for him to catch up.
"Come, Master Sluggard! Come!"
Gimli sighed with exasperation at Legolas' renewed boundless enthusiasm—they were all truly feeling better, he supposed wryly. Legolas' hair came out of its tie and tangled as he weaved and dodged, and Gimli reached behind his own neck to tighten his silver clasp.
This new day was, Gimli thought, a chance for joy, indeed.
As the sun continued to rise over the reinvigorated city—began to touch the edges of that future garden behind them—it was as if they had never grieved, for they were themselves more whole for having allowed each other a moment to be broken. They were all three building a better world, in their own ways, a better world for Aragorn's imminent child—a future king of men—and the children of others—a hope that could endure, and—despite all they had lost—that hope was yet worth living for.
They ran for a long time, and then walked in companionable silence, and then took from the stables' ruins some more honeysuckle. Legolas sang, and Gimli grumbled, and the bells of the city chimed to tell that the King was in court and the markets were open, and everything carried on and everything—for everyone—endured.
Thank you for enduring this meandering one-shot! ;) Please do drop a review on the way out. (What did you like, what can I improve on, etc.) Happy Spring to readers in the Northern Hemisphere!