Legolas will not be swayed.
I argue and I plead but he is resolute.
"This makes no sense, Legolas. We cannot just cease to be...stop loving..."
"I did not say I would not love you." He replies. "I will always love you. If I end up in the Halls of Mandos I will still love you. At the breaking of the world I will love you. That will never end Elrohir. This is but a pause, a gap, a chance to breathe."
"A chance to breathe? I cannot breathe without you!" He will listen to no sense at all. So confident, so secure is he in his decision. But he hasn't asked me before he made it. He hasn't checked with me. "This is the sea-longing speaking Legolas!" I try again to reach him, to make him see reality. "You have had it barely a moment and already it twists your mind."
"It is not Elrohir," he says firmly, "I know what it is capable but this is not it. The sea is quiet, it is quiescent and happy simply to be with me. This is me speaking, not the sea. I cannot sail," he continues, "I cannot leave my friends, I cannot rid myself of the sealonging, I cannot do more damage to you. This is a solution. And then, when we do sail, when we leave Arda for new shores, then we will be reunited. It is not forever."
"You choose Estel over me!" I cry. It is a petty, hurtful response and I do not even believe it myself.
But he does not leap to the bait. He does not attack back, he simply shakes his head in sorrow.
"I choose no one over you, Beloved, for none can match you. I choose you. This is me choosing you. I will protect you and myself. I will make sure we endure."
There is no arguing with him.
Elladan tries. He speaks with him at length, retracts those words that are now being used to justify this decision. He spends hours pleading and rationalising but Legolas will not be moved.
Estel tries also for he is distraught. He visits me and begs for forgiveness. He sees this as another thing, one more burden that Legolas carries because of their friendship and he is anguished. But Legolas will not listen to him either. He is so determined he is right.
I will say one thing, this is a Legolas I have not seen for years. A Legolas confident in himself and his future. It makes me waver. It makes me doubt myself.
But while Legolas may be strong and self assured about his choices the rest of us are not. I am broken, Estel and Elladan are weighed down with guilt and they rage at each other for Estel blames Elladan for this. It was his words that planted the seed for this choice and he cannot see past that. It hurts me to see them splinter apart.
It is Arwen who finds me a way to go forward. She visits me as I sit quietly recuperating in the sun and mourning my life. She sits herself down beside me and pulls my head down to rest upon her shoulder.
"My poor Brother," she says quietly. "You are so unhappy." She does not have to reach into my mind to know that.
"How can I be anything else? Legolas will not listen to me," is my reply.
She is quiet then. She does not answer me for a long time but simply strokes my hair. It is so comforting.
"Will he not?" She says eventually, softly, "or is it that all of you are not listening to him?"
"What do you mean?" I lift my head and turn to look at her. "What do you mean I do not listen?"
"You and Legolas, you have always been exciting . . . Dangerous, even, the pair of you together. No one could ever accuse you of being boring. Your highs are high and your lows, despairing. You know that, Elrohir, and it will always be that way. Even in Valinor the two of you will be creating chaos I think."
Does she criticise us? I am unsure and I do not know how to take this.
"I do not want boring!" I protest. "I like us the way we are."
"Of course!" She smiles brightly then. "He is perfect for you. You are so well suited. He balances you and he loves you so. You are lucky, brother—but you could never say it is calming."
"He loves me but he does not want me. He abandons me."
She takes my hand then and cradles it in her own.
"He has not said that Elrohir. He is not abandoning you. He asks for respite. Legolas bears a heavy load to remain here. He should sail and yet he cannot, for to leave Estel and Gimli would destroy him. He has to find a way to survive here. He needs some space perhaps, some calm. He can cope with the sea-longing, he can cope with the grief that creeps up on him, he can cope with the excitement that is the two of you, but he can not cope with it all at once. It is a short time only, in the scheme of things, that he asks for."
"Do not say that!" I snap at her, I lash out, because that short time she speaks of, that is the measure of her life and I do not wish to hear it.
"Elrohir, my brother, I know you love him," she continues as if I had not shown her my anger. "Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice for love. Perhaps this is your sacrifice? Can you do it if he needs it?"
That brings my objections, my arguments to a halt for if there was someone who knows about sacrificing for the one you love it is her. She has given away her entire life, her immortality because of her love for Estel and how I have struggled with that decision. I have punished him for years because of it. And so I stop and think. Arwen has given up her entirety, yet Legolas only asks for a few years from me.
"I do not know, Arwen " is my answer in the end. "I do not know if I can do it."
"Can you try? He only wants you to try for him."
"I should be the one who helps him." I think this is what hurts me the most about this. "He should be nearer me, not further away and yet he runs from me."
"If you wish to help him, you must help in the way he wants it. Not in the way you want to give it."
Her words echo around my mind long after she has left me. I am still thinking on them when the sun has set and Legolas arrives to sit with me.
Every day he comes and sits and tells me what happens beyond my door, for Estel will not let me out of here and it is tedious. Usually his cheery conversation ends with me raging or sulking, trying to tear down his confidence in this decision and getting nowhere. But still he comes and sits and chats, or at least attempts to. You could almost believe there is nothing wrong between us, except for the fact he never touches me. I burn for his touch.
Today is different.
As he settles down beside me, close, but not close enough, smiling his brilliant smile, I look at him and I see him, actually see him. He is well. That is an understatement. He glows with wellbeing. I cannot remember when I last saw him so unburdoned.
"You are happy," I say it with an element of surprise for I had not noticed just how much he glowed. It is hard to see through my own unhappiness.
"I am . . . Secure." He corrects me and he struggles to find the word he wants to describe himself. The one he settles on is a strange one.
"Secure? Secure in what?"
"Secure in myself. Secure in our future. I will protect us from the sealonging and all its misery. I will protect you. I cannot change anything else but this I can do. I have been battered by the winds of my fate for long enough. No more Elrohir. I am in control."
And suddenly I understand. Arwen is right. I have not been listening before.
Legolas has been adrift in misery for so long and there has been nothing he could do about it. He is trapped, trapped by his friends and by the sea. What Legolas wants is control over something . . . Just one thing in his life and us, him and I, the two of us, is the only thing he has a chance of controlling.
Perhaps I should be honoured that he trusts me, trusts in our love, enough that he feels he can ask me this.
But can I give it to him?
And can we survive it?
I want to help him, I do, but something feels wrong still. I have so many doubts. There is so much of this plan of his that could go wrong.
"Legolas, what if this does not work? What if, when it comes time for us to sail we have nothing left? What if you find someone else?"
I do not worry about myself finding another for that is ridiculous at the extreme. Someone better than Legolas? There is no such thing. But him—he could find someone with just the flick of his fingers. But he only shrugs, it does not concern him it seems.
"Someone else? That is silly Elrohir. There will never be any one else."
Arwen's words from days ago, the ones I pushed to the back of my mind choose that moment to float forward into my consciousness.
"What of Elladan?" I do not even think before I say it. It is cruel. I know that the moment I see his face. A look of devastation flits across it cracking his self assurance into pieces. This newfound confidence is only paper thin it seems.
"Why do you say that?" he gasps and instantly I want to take it back. I want to take that look of hurt and pain off his face. I want the new, certain, sure of himself, Legolas back. What kind of fool am I?
"Forget I said it," I say. "It was just a wondering, a what-if. It meant nothing." I seek hurriedly to distract him from my clumsiness. "Legolas . . . if I give you this will you promise me something?" And he allows himself to be distracted, because I think, he wishes to open the problem that is Elladan as little as I.
"What kind of promise do you need?" He asks and he tilts his head just so, as he always does and it tears at my heart.
"If I agree to do this. If I agree to step back, to give you this break, you must promise me if it does not work, if it puts us at risk, if we begin to lose ourselves and what we have, that we will revisit this. It is not set in stone that it will stay this way."
"It will work." His confidence returns tenfold but I know now how fragile it really is.
"Legolas!" I am firm, I must be firm because I need this from him. "If you are sure it will work then the promise is an easy one to give. I need you to agree to this."
He drops his head and fiddles with the edge of his sleeve and I wonder what makes him nervous but eventually he sees sense, just this once.
"I will promise you this Elrohir for I would not lose you. I would never lose you." It is enough . . . For now.
"Then I will try this . . . What you propose. For you Legolas."
"For us," he says but that is not the truth of it. I do it because he needs it. For me, it is an agony. But if this is the help he needs to feel secure, to feel in control of his destiny then I will give it.
"Will you write at least? Will you do that much for me?"
"Of course !" He looks up in surprise, "I do not mean we would cut each other off . . . I could not do that!" I wonder then if he has even thought this through clearly. What does he mean then? How does he envisage this new relationship of ours working?
His hand hovers over mine as if he wants to touch me. I feel his energy, his fea, sparking against mine. It sends shocks through my skin. I miss his touch beyond imagining. This is too hard and it has only just begun.
And he withdraws, the moment is gone.
I am left in the cold of my loneliness.
He does write as he promised, when he leaves for Ithilien. Long newsy letters filled with the goings on of his people, for I know them all. And then later when I return to Imladris he writes of Aragorn and Arwen, and all they are up to. His letters are upbeat and happy, positive always and far from the miserable yearnings I used to receive. I wonder at first if it is an act. Does he pretend this to satisfy me? But Estel sees him often and he tells me he is well, beyond well he says, in fact almost—but not quite—the old Legolas we used to know.
Was it me dragging him down all this time?
And so I read his letters. I love them, I imagine his light. But it is a light I can no longer reach. A light that no longer shines for me.
And so I read his letters, written with love, that is obvious.
And I weep.
THE END
Authors note: So this is not the end obviously but it is the end for now. I promise I will not leave them like this forever! Thanks for reading! : )