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This particular drabble is about that brief scene in TBotFA with Bard and Thrandy. I read somewhere that the 'white gems' were something Thranduil had ordered for his wife, so that's what I've done in this.
#20: Gems and Jewels (Thranduil)
"You will go to war over a handful of gems?" Bard's voice radiated disbelief as he stared at the Elvenking.
Astride his elk, Thranduil stiffened imperceptibly. A wisp of memory, sweet but painful, floated into his consciousness, one that he would almost rather forget but at the same time didn't want to ever let go...
Laughter. The swish of skirts. A flash of dark hair. The click of a small box being opened and the radiance of dozens of white gems sparkling from where they lay amid blue velvet. "Oh, Thranduil. dearest, thank you!"
"For our anniversary, Elarinya." A kiss.
"They're beautiful!"
"Yes, aren't they? They were my mother's, but she left them behind when she sailed."
He gazed down at her from over her shoulder, happy because she was. "I was going to have the Dwarves of Erebor set them into a necklace for you, but then I thought you might like to choose their arrangement yourself."
She smiled in a way that seemed to outshine the glittering jewels before her. "I'll get to work on that right away." She sifted her hand through the diamonds and lesser crystals, and they fell from her fingers in a cascade of brilliance.
Mere weeks later, she was gone, stabbed through the heart on a northern battlefield as she defended a wounded Legolas from an Orc.
The gems were the heirlooms of his people and one of the last things she had touched and pored over. He had been determined to get them back, necklace finished or no, but Thror-curse him!–had grown greedy. The Dwarf Lord refused to yield them up, saying that the jewelry had taken his smiths far longer than expected and that more payment than originally specified was due. For all his pride, Thranduil gave the required pay, but Thror insisted that it still was not enough. In a rage which he concealed out of pride, Thranduil had left, vowing to reclaim his own even if he had to wait until the End.
Now, on this wintry day nearly two hundred years later, his chance had finally come to reclaim what was rightfully his.
All of this passed through his mind in a blink. Slowly he turned to face the Man, his face expressionless. Years of suppressing his emotions after his wife's death had made him cold and distant, a master of self-control. Aloud he said,
"The heirlooms of my people are not lightly forsaken."
You could not possibly understand just what that "handful of gems" means to me, mortal.
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