Author's note: This chapter did not come easily, and I am not entirely pleased with it still, but I wanted it done. Thank you to Cheekybeak, again, for reading this for content. The next chapter will start Part III, which is a bit confrontational and angst-heavy! Thank you to all who are still reviewing-I believe I have replied to everyone!-incluso Monic, con sus palabras dulces sobre mis razones del retraso, and to all of the other Guest reviewers. Your words encourage me to work through the tough connective sections to tell this story.

Character refresher:
Gwaerain - Thranduil's wife
Lumornon - eldest of their children
Felavel - second oldest, daughter who recently died
Piniriel - youngest of the four siblings and still quite wee
Anaron - a lead healer, and Ithildim's father
Ithildim - Legolas' dear childhood friend and fellow warrior
Saida - Legolas and Saida's childhood friend
Lostariel - Captain of Legolas' unit and good friend to Lumornon
Amonhir - Lostariel's second

Part II:
Chapter 11—Interludes

Interlude I: Thranduil

Thranduil sat in a chair by his son's bed as Anaron ground and measured doses of medicine at the repurposed table nearby. He considered what exactly he should do about this-politically and personally. He felt dead and cold and detached, as if the life he had lead the past thousand years were just a vaguely pleasant dream, and he had woken up now—rudely—to this nightmare.

His eyes ran up the quilt folded over the bed, otherwise stripped bare. It piled in a heavy ribbon on Legolas' thighs, for he had shaken for a time after he had finally calmed—from anxiety, most likely, Anaron had explained—before Piniriel fell asleep at his side. Thranduil had wrapped his daughter in the throw Legolas kept on the back of his desk chair and tucked her beneath Lumornon's chin, where he still rested on her tiny bed across the room.

Above the quilt, Legolas' chest was bare, for Ithildim had stripped his shirt from him an hour before, when he had again become frantic, trying to clear his neck from any perceived obstructions. His son's clawing at nothing had broken his heart, especially after Anaron had explained it was not the swelling, which had, by that time, been resolved, but rather his son's lingering confusion causing the panic—there was, therefore, nothing they could do to ease his fear, besides soothing and waiting for the medicine to encourage his body into healing.

But Legolas' soiled wool pants still peeked out from beneath the quilt, for they were to be left on until everything was documented. And so Thranduil found himself looking away again, this time to his son's face and to the finally darkening thumb marks on his throat. There, he could not linger either; he dropped his head into his hands and breathed through them to root himself.

What would he do with his son? How could they recover from this?

What would he do with his wife, to whom he owed so much?

Some days, Thranduil felt he truly owed her everything. . .

He and Gwaerain had bonded in the wake of their losses in the Last Alliance. Having lost their fathers to war and their mothers to the grief of it, they became one another's constants in a time of unsurity and began, together, to heal. In that healing, they fell in love, and it was real and true and pure, or seemed it, and yet... Healing together can confuse souls—especially in two so intertwined as they—and Thranduil, cast in such a new leadership role, became a collection of problems while Gwaerain, in her own grief, became one who reveled in solving them. . . Eventually, they both became two self-contained problems running on parallel tracks, with their children strung like laundry between them.

With the birth of their third child, the stress of their new hardships was not much eased—though happy they were in the rearing of him—so when the woods lightened for a moment like sun breaking through clouds in the storm—preemptimg a sun-shower before the descending whirlwind—they decided to have their fourth.

And that was their last child, and they were not stronger for her. . .

After Piniriel, Thranduil could only watch as Gwaerain withdrew, as she began to wean their daughter from her breast milk too early to pass her to the nursemaids and, eventually, to their own fierce and tender Legolas, for he too was an eager solver of problems. Thranduil could only watch as Gwaerain took to pacing the halls and standing at the gate for Felavel and Legolas' returns, any time they left their home. He could do nothing when Gwaerain took to the trees and sat in the canopy to watch the stars from sunset to dawn, night after night after never-ending night.

Thranduil had thought his children did not notice. . .he had desperately hoped not, for they were each already too occupied with worry. He never could control Gwaerain, and though he was usually glad for that, she had, by that point, become one more uncertainty in a whole world of them.

But Thranduil knew, regrettably, that they must have noticed, after all. . .

He remembered sometimes, sat around the breakfast table, how we would watch Legolas goad his mother into joking, for Gwaerain's laugh lifted all their spirits, and Legolas particularly had met it with joy from the moment he was born. Recently, he had seen Legolas work harder and harder to catch his mother's eye after each jest. Looking back, Thranduil would have sworn he saw Legolas hold his breath in the moments after each attempt—eyes simultaneously wide and wary and hopeful—until Gwaerain eventually spoke and smiled, and he would breathe out a soft and evening sigh, and laugh his bright laugh, hands flitting into the air with Gwaerain's permission to tell his joke or story.

Now, Thranduil knew he should have seen that hesitation as a sort of fear, a predictor of this action. After Felavel's passing, he should not have underestimated his wife's love for their youngest son, nor her desperation to cling to a normal and a past that was no longer theirs to own. . .

But he had underestimated her, and in the very worst of ways.

For his youngest son slept now on his bed—sheets stripped, balled into a pile in the corner—drugged into healing with his stoic and calm older brother a mess on Piniriel's bed across from them.

Suddenly, there was a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up to see Anaron standing silent with a marinating tincture gripped loosely in one hand.

"You should clean him now. Lostariel has finished, and Legolas would feel better knowing it was you," Anaron offered quietly. He stretched out his empty hand toward the Elvenking, but Thranduil could not yet move.

He finally looked away from Anaron's open, tired face and back to his son. Nodding vaguely, he took Anaron's hand and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.

What would he do with Gwaerain? What could he do?

Thranduil did not know.

He should have said something before, perhaps, should have inquired, spoken, intervened. . . But he had not.

So he leaned forward to roll down the quilt about his son's hips. He undid the buttons of his son's trousers, took the proffered rag from Anaron, and set numbly to his task.

Thranduil was not used to not knowing. . . He did not like it.

Interlude II: Lumornon

Lostariel felt a brush of fabric at her shoulder and a barely-there breath at the tip of her ear and knew Lumornon had risen from his spot on the floor to hover behind her.

"Lumornon." She did not yet turn. "It is the healers' and my responsibility to document the injuries and actions of these past hours. I do not need you compromising your health or the integrity of the record by involving yourself."

Lumornon leaned back from where he had been peering over her shoulder, reading over her notes as she worked. He sighed heavily and then threw his hands into the air. Lostariel finally twisted in her chair to see him.

"I need something to do, Lostariel," Lumornon admitted emphatically. "I cannot just sit here and ponder-I am losing my mind."

Lostariel looked up into his face and considered him carefully—he had unbraided his hair and it was mussed on one side from sleep. He had layered a thick sweater over his neat silk shirt and it listed, exposing a collarbone so that he looked more like a child roused in the night, seeking out his parent at the howling of the wind, than the much-respected Crown Prince of Mirkwood.

He was undone and tired and, she reasoned, he probably needed this. . .

"Then find me Saida," Lostariel finally said firmly, coming to a decision, tucking her pen behind her ear and crossing her arms, as Lumornon swayed indecisively. "She left Legolas a note earlier this evening and I would know what she intended with it."

Lumornon nodded and Lostariel stood from her seat then, stepping to the side and straightening her papers.

"But you must not question her, Lumornon. Bring Saida straight to me, and when she is gone and all of this is quiet for a time, I will pour you a glass of wine and distract you. You worry me when you are like this." She pushed up her sleeves distractedly. "You think too much—you are like your father."

Lumornon huffed and shook out his hands before pulling the sweater over his head and dropping it to the floor. He exchanged it for the finer jacket he had earlier draped on the back of Lostariel's chair; he turned up the cuffs. "Someone must be, Lostariel."

"And if you want tea, pick some up from the lauder," she said, ignoring him. "Send for a messenger or bring me Captain Amonhir, as well."

"All right."

"And when Anaron is finished with Ithildim, I will want him, too," she instructed, seemingly nonchalant.

"I do not know that Ithildim is actually with his father at this point. When I left, Anaron was trying to force him back to their home—"

"That is not the point, Lumornon," Lostariel intrerrupted, raising her eyebrows.

Lumornon ran a hand over his face and was suprised to find himself smiling slightly when he looked back at her.

"I see. . . Well, thank you, Lostariel, for the tasks."

"You are welcome, my foolish friend." She took a step forward and grasped his shoulders; she pressed a kiss to his forehead before shooing him toward the door. "This House of Oropher. . ." she murmered with insincere annoyance."You are all the same!"

Lumornon laughed despite his exhaustion and pushed his way out the door, waving a hand goodbye as it swung shut behind him. He headed down the hall and through the winding corridors, searching for the the echoes of his brother's stalwart friends, set on completing this task of busying himself.

As Lumornon began his search, Lostariel sighed and rubbed her eyes; she sank back into her chair. Pulling the pen from behind her ear, she propped an elbow on the table and set back to the documents. Until the reports were written, her night could not even begin to end, and it had been such a very long one already.

Interlude III: Legolas

When Legolas finally found himself again, he was laid in his bed under a heavy quilt. At first he could not hear and thought to panic, but then he allowed himself to awaken more and the world came rushing in, and his ears opened, and his sight focused.

Peripherally, he saw Anaron sat at his table, which was not where it was supposed to be, and he wrote. Legolas could hear a pen scratching further to his left, punctuated with the soft brush of a charcoal stick, but he did not turn to see the source.

He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if still sleeping to give him a moment to orient himself, because the last thing he remembered was chaos, and he did not want to bring that back upon himself so quickly by letting them know he was awake.

He heard a key in the door and felt every part of him freeze, but after the click and the soft whoosh of air there was a shadow on the bed and a familiar voice nearby: "How is he, Captain?"

"He has not stirred since he woke to you." Captain Amonhir's voice now. "Anaron says it is likely the sedative. Now that he is clear again, Anaron has been easing it in."

"Hm," his father said thoughtfully, and Legolas could not let his father worry—his father had been doing too much of that, for long centuries before Legolas was even born.

He turned his head and opened his mouth to speak. "I am here father," he meant to say, but instead, as a breath of air hit the back of his throat, he gasped and could not suppress the pain, like breathing too fast on a winter morning after running too long—a cold burn.

And then his father was above him, hands clasping either side of his face, and his vision was cut through with two swinging curtains of gold that fell about his own shoulders, so that when he looked up he looked up into a tunnel of gold, and at the end of that tunnel was his father and his silver eyes, cold as ice and hot as molten steel all at once, and all Legolas saw in them was pain—he closed his eyes against them, and felt his father kiss his head and cry.

Legolas swallowed and coughed and he could not stop it. His throat hurt like there were jarring needles in it and his lungs felt heavy and half a step behind—if the world were a tune then his lungs were a badly trained dancer, and he could not keep up.

Everything is too hard, he thought, and he did not understand.

It felt wrong and his mind was so foggy, like his whole world was a dream, as if he felt it all from far away.

He remembered once watching the campfire—on the sixth night without rest during a mission gone wrong—and seeing it as if through frosted glass, like it was a description of fire he had read once in a book and vaguely recalled, instead of a physical thing, laid out before him in real life, warming his skin as he numbly checked their arrows.

This was like that: not quite real, but real enough that he remembered his mother and why she was not with him now, as so often she was when he was unwell. His mind was tired, yes, but his body still felt. He felt the quilt on his chest and how his right hand laid out on top of it, curled on its side. He felt a seam's slight pressure on his littlest finger and shifted his hand to pick at it as he waited to open his eyes again, when the burning was less and the coughing quit riding his chest.

He wanted warmth near him, reassurance and normalcy, anything that made this unfortunate reality slightly more palatable. So when his coughs were through, he opened his eyes slightly and lifted his hand to that of his father, where it rested on his right cheek, and squeezed it.

It had been so long since his father had needed to give him strength, and he relaxed in the warmth of that gift—freely given— clouded by memories of moments before the storm, before his mother's darkness eclipsed it all.

Anaron hovered at the side of his bed, his father clutched his hand back tightly. He heard the door breathe open again—Ithildim coming or Amonhir going? He did not know—but his father was here now, and, so, he would be fine.

The room blurred further into mist and memory—golden light and the scent of marshmallow, his father's thumb stroking his cheek.

That was all he knew before he fell back asleep.

Thank you for reading this last chapter of Part II. Please consider leaving a review on your way out.