Surprise! I'm updating early! I wrote a ton of new content the last three days and thought I'd reward us all with the next installment of Part Two. Thank you again for reading and reviewing. I do enjoy them! That's all folks! Much love xoxo.
The stables were a busy place this early in the morning. The stable hands busily fed the horses quietly calling for their breakfast. Their collective breaths hovered over their heads in a cloud of warm fog in the chilled air. The wholesome scent of dried alfalfa, sweetened oats, and corn drove those that weren't already eating to impatiently rattle their stall doors and buckets in the hopes of being fed next. Some of the younger boys were already fast at work mucking stalls and cleaning tack. Farm work was early work.
Legolas stopped to stroke the long proud nose of his mount, Arod. The steadfast and strong-legged gelding whose even temper had allowed even Gimli to ride him. He spoke softly, so much so that Nat could barely make out the words but she knew by his speech pattern that he had slipped into his native tongue. Adamant for affection, the horse pushed his head into Legolas' lean chest and ignored his breakfast. He stroked the eager gelding thoroughly with great attention.
"I never thought horses could be so...affectionate." Nat stepped up beside him.
"Some yes, others no. They are as people, with different personalities and needs. The horses of Rohan are descendants of the Mearas and much more intelligent than your average mount." He stroked his thumbs into the horse's ears and was answered with a low grunt and a solid nudge of Arod's oversized head. A soft smile lit his face as he continued his affectionate strokes. "I asked him if he would carry you to Lothlorien then come back to carry Gimli and I on to Gondor. He has agreed most wholeheartedly."
She reached out to stroke the horse's white forehead and the hair that swirled like a spiral at the center of it. The strangeness of elves unsettled her. They were so intimately intertwined with their environment that every flower, tree, and animal communicated with them in some fashion. How anyone could interpret a horse she would never know but the horse seemed to have no difficulty understanding Legolas.
"How do I say "thank you"? In your language?"
"To him, you would say, Le athae for he has given you a gift of kindness and respect." The tongue of the elves was difficult for mortal mouths which were often poorly accented and rough when shaping the eloquent sounds of Sindarin.
"Le athae." Nat said impeccably. Legolas nodded in surprised approval.
"You have a gift for language."
"I've had a lot of practice."
His gaze shifted suddenly toward the entrance.
"Someone approaches and quickly." He looked down his fine-boned nose at her; whoever it was, they were set on finding her as it was her name the man called as he came up the worn street toward the stable.
"I will ready the horse." Legolas smoothly unlatched the stall door. He spoke softly to the horse again who happily went back to his corner to munch on what was left of his breakfast. She met Legolas' eyes over the back of his horse and knew in an instant who had come to find her.
Gramm called her name from outside.
Bewildered, Nat turned to the stable entrance and found the doorway filled with the wide shoulders of a bedraggled Rohir. He looked half tossed together with his shirt untucked and his wild hair loose around his face. He'd let the shadow of a beard dust his hard jaw.
"You're leaving." Those two words sounded more like an accusation than a question.
"I left you a note."
"Oh, I got your note." She refused to feel guilty for fulfilling the promises she'd made and the duty thrust upon her.
He jammed his hand into his pocket and produced the brief note she'd written to him and the other men the night before. Eowyn had made quick work of distributing her farewell. He tossed her written words at her boots.
Baffled, she took the blow and the anger that followed in his heated eyes. He was angry at her for leaving a farewell? What more did he want from her?
He watched as her eyes went quick and clever. Absorbing every detail of him, analyzing, thinking. She could understand anger, resentment, bitterness...but she didn't understand this. She didn't understand him. Not fully anyway. How could she when they'd had so little time? He was leaps and bounds beyond whatever she could possibly be thinking. She didn't see him, not the way he wanted to be seen, he was just another member of the cadre. Nat had grouped him in with all the rest.
It infuriated him even more watching her, watching him, not as a man but as a problem. Just something else to solve.
One more thing to handle.
Her casual dismissal skewered him.
"Is that it? Is that honestly all you had to say to me?" His words hissed out between his teeth as he stalked over to her. His jaw set hard and square. Her clever green eyes widened just a hair in surprise. Where was this coming from?
"Gramm." She said quietly, trying to calm him and give herself time to compute this new facet of him.
"Don't…" He said, moving in closer. He knew she preferred her personal space; it was how she managed to keep up all those carefully crafted defenses she'd built around herself. It was how she managed, even now, to not recognize the feelings he had for her.
"I spoke with Wulfric. I know where you're going. I know what you've been tasked with."
"Then you know why I have to go." She spread her hands out in front of her. What could he possibly want if he already knew where she was going and what she was doing?
"I know it." Slowly, his anger quieted but the heat remained right under his skin. Gramm couldn't blame her, not exactly for her confusion. "I had hoped for more time with you."
He reached for her hand even as it flinched back from him.
She met his eyes, brilliant and sad. Watched as the anger melted away and was replaced with a look so desperately intense that it instantly made her uncomfortable. No, Nat thought, this wasn't happening. She tried to withdraw her hand but he held it tight in his own.
"Do not deny me this." He said softly, drawing her close and placing their joined hands over his burning chest. Their joined hands branded his skin and he basked in every inch of awareness that came over him.
"Gramm." His eyes fell closed, pained, at the denial in her voice that didn't even have the decency to sound unsure. Isn't that why he admired her so adamantly? She was strong, steady, and capable. A woman who knew her own mind.
She pulled her hands back firmly and stuffed them into the pockets of her trousers to remove them from temptation. If her life had been different, if she'd been different, perhaps she would have kept her hands right where he'd put them.
"This can't happen." She cleared her throat in an attempt to loosen the binding regret that clawed its way forth. If she'd been different, kinder, perhaps she could have felt something. Anything other than indifference for him, a good and kind man.
He watched as her eyes glazed over even as they never left his face.
"Damn it, Natalie!" He cursed and thrust a hand through his hair. He paced a half-circle, hands stoutly perched on his hips. "I'm not asking you to marry me for fucks sake."
He tried his best to be reasonable and took a deep calming breath. He hated the passive expression on her face. It infuriated him.
"I'm not asking anything of you." He lunged forward, taking advantage of how she'd stuffed her hands into the pockets of her trousers, and took her face between his hands.
She felt his hands, hard and battle-worn, go soft as he held her.
"Give me time." He pleaded his eyes racing across her face for any flicker of emotion.
"I can't, Gramm." She couldn't be with him, shouldn't be with him. He was too young and green to understand the kind of life she'd lived. He didn't know her, deep down, he didn't have a clue who he was dealing with. She was entangled in complications that he couldn't even fathom and one of those complications...was Haldir. He could deny what was between them but she could still feel it, feel him, and knew without a shadow of a doubt he could feel it too.
"Can't." He ran a thumb over her alabaster cheek. "Or won't?"
When she didn't pull away he stepped in until they were body to body. His blood heated at the gentle contact. She was so still in his arms he wondered briefly if she'd stopped breathing entirely. He brushed a hand over her hair and curled a stray cluster of strands around his finger at the front of her ear. "You've bewitched me."
Before he could convince himself otherwise he leaned in quickly and captured her lush mouth with his. He groaned at the soft contact but a moment was all he had before she responded with a shove so hard that it knocked him down and into the wall nearly ten feet behind them.
He laughed from the stable floor at the fury on her face and knocked his head back against the wall. "There she is!" He'd rather her gaze upon him seething mad than to be looked at for one more moment with such disinterest.
"You're delusional." She barked out with a scowl.
"So you've said." His grin was sour and filled with thorough disappointment.
"You want honesty?" She seethed, he hardly knew her. "I know what you see when you look at me, a pretty face, tits, a body that makes you want and want hard. You think you admire me because I'm independent, speak my mind, and I can fight. What better partner could you, a warrior for life, want for himself?" She stood above him looking down, her eyes hard and dangerous. "But what you don't know is that you only see that person, those sides of me, because that's how I was made because that's the person I want you to see"
She couldn't stop the crack that faulted her voice as she gestured down at herself. If she'd only been anybody else. "I was trained to draw you in. Engineered to attract you. Everything about me was fabricated to make you want to crawl between my thighs. I'm what you want...but I'm not what you need." There was so much about her that he couldn't fathom and that she didn't want him to know. He was so young and better off without her. Somehow he'd fallen into her web, ensnared by a face and a body she'd never asked for, and she hadn't even been trying to catch him.
"Stop for one damn moment and think with your brain instead of your cock."
She drew out each word, punched them home with bitterness. "I could never make you happy" She swallowed hard. "I'm not the woman for you."
Gramm stood in staunch silence, gathered himself.
"Do us both a courtesy and don't assume that you know what makes me happy, what I see, or what I want in a woman. Do you think I don't realize how different you are?"
"Stop…"
"You're beautiful in every sense of the word."
"Please...stop." He was only proving her right. He saw the shell, the mask, not the monster beneath it.
"There is no one else I've thought of. No one else..."
Neither of them had much but he had a plan. He would carve out a life for them here. Build them a small home where they could rest after their duties were complete. Where they could start a family and eventually settle.
She could see his mind turning over with all the reasons he'd told himself that she was the one for him. She could see the desperate hope in his eyes even as he paced.
"Look at me, Gramm." She ordered sternly. "Look at me!" She barked and his pacing came to a halt.
"You want honesty?" She stuffed her hands deep into her pockets again. She had to make him see. "There would be no life between us. I'm eighty-seven years old and I'm going to keep living long after you're dead."
That gave him pause and she watched as clarity took hold and thrust down its roots in his mind.
"Do you know what I've done for seventy of those years? I've butchered my way across continents and made my living off the bloodied broken bodies of thousands. Men, women, children...it never mattered...they didn't matter. I've murdered, thieved, and sexually manipulated more people than I can even remember. My body has been just as useful a tool as my gun." His face twisted in a wild mix of emotions she couldn't singularly name.
"I can't have children Gramm. That gift was taken from me when I was still practically a child myself. Do you want to know why?"
He shook his head in grief as she destroyed everything he'd believed of her. Every pedestal he'd place her on she kicked over and shattered with violent transparency.
"So that the dozens and dozens of men I've fucked wouldn't get me pregnant before I slit their throats in their own beds."
He cursed at her and hissed out a breath that left his chest heaving.
"Is that the woman you think you want to spend your life with? A murderer and a whore."
"I don't believe you…"
"Believe it, Gramm. It's true. I'm not the person you've created in your mind...I never was."
He could see it now, realized all the stood between them and all he hadn't known; all that he hadn't wanted to know. He cursed loudly and in his anger, violently punched the closest wall. Natalie didn't even flinch as she absorbed the aftermath of her crushing blow.
It was better this way.
He punched the wall again. With his fist aching, he braced himself against the wall. Damn her! Damn her for telling him this way. Not for the sake of honesty or confession but to wound him. And wound him she had...deeply. He was just as angry with himself as he was with her. He heaved another breath into his lungs. He hadn't imagined...how could he when she'd had so much life before him? He'd never asked and she hadn't said. Could he love her knowing these things about her? Could he love a woman he knew he would leave behind with no legacy, no children or grandchildren? Could he forget everyone else who had come before him?
He wanted the answer to be yes.
Gramm met her eyes and saw the pain in her admission. This wasn't what he'd intended and not at all how he'd wanted to leave things between them. His worry, his desperation had caused him to ruin any chance he'd cultivated with her. He'd been presumptuous and...an idiot. He felt every bit the fool.
He bent slowly and crouched over where the folded letter lay atop the stable floor. He picked it up gingerly and tucked it, with care, into the pocket of his breeches where he kept the pins from her hair.
"I'll tell the others you wished them farewell...and farewell to you, Natalia Romanoff." In Rohirric, he added, "May the grass be forever green that rises up to meet your step until next we meet."
Solemn but set to his course he left her standing in the stables staring after him. The pieces of his heart at her feet.
Legolas brought out the horse behind her but said nothing as he adjusted the saddle to the length of her leg. He spent the next few minutes checking her mount's feet, making minute changes to the tack. He was fiddling but knew little else of what to do for the moment. He greatly regretted that he had witnessed such an intimate confrontation. Such things should be conducted in private but Gramm had given Natasha no such courtesy and she had given to him as rudely and terribly as she had gotten from him.
She was hurt.
Any man worth the name would have heard it in her voice, seen it in her eyes. Her body language alone had shown Legolas how deeply the situation affected her because she'd chosen to stop showing anything at all. A man who claimed love for her would have most certainly seen all of these things.
He cast a sidelong glance her way and noted as her eyes and jaw clenched tight, with her hands shoved deep into her pockets; she looked every inch of the angry female he knew lurked inside her, one she kept tightly leashed.
A life so long-lived was bound to have its stumbling blocks; moments of regret and decisions that would have been better not made. The woman she chose to be now was the only woman of consequence. Her life was now her own to live. Her past was exactly where it should be, behind her, and although her past had built her it did not define her. She simply used it to distance herself from Gramm and the promise of a relationship that she was unable to uphold. Nat believed she had done what was best for him, best for them both. Behind her self deprivation and obvious self-loathing was well-intended honesty.
When she finally spoke her back was still to Legolas.
"I'm sorry you had to listen to that."
He shook his head, "It is not for you to apologize nor my place to comment on your private affairs."
Legolas remained silent; it was no business of his to medal with a situation that was obviously layered with complications.
She blew out a heavy breath. "He's a good young man. Kind and as loyal as they come. His comrades respect him but he's impetuous and…naive in many ways. He too often acts based on his gut instinct without doing the reconnaissance. He sees what he wants to see in me."
"Is it the inexperience of his age that bothers you so?" A funny question from an immortal.
She chuckled. "Yes and no. Believe it or not Legolas it's kind of hard to find someone with shared life experiences." She was a mortal in an immortal body. A culmination of life experiences that had spanned unnaturally long and would stretch on infinitely longer. She'd grown in the dark corners of the world and he...he was barely twenty. Still green and golden and untarnished by a lifetime of hideous servitude.
He would make a fine husband for a like-minded young woman.
Legolas answered slowly as he slung the reins over the saddle horn. "Life experiences are subjective to the individual. It is in empathy for others that we often find a foundation for relationships of any varying degree of intimacy. Where friendship can find the strength to blossom into love."
He gently nudged her elbow toward the entrance as he led her mount to the stable doors. Her time to depart was upon them.
Nat mounted smoothly and gathered her reins. "Love isn't always enough to build a life on Legolas. I would hurt him, one way or another."
Legolas gazed up at her. A mortal living an immortal life and wondered at the complexities of it. She had lived surrounded by humans and watched them grow, age, whither, and die as she remained ageless. It was a conflict he too had subjected himself to by submerging himself into mortal culture. In befriending Aragorn, a brother in arms and kin in his heart.
How did she live with it?
She patted the gelding's neck gently and Legolas grasped her hand in his own. Carefully he slid something into her palm.
"Don't waste the time you're given, Natasha, however much or however little it is." Opportunity had a habit of slipping through the fingers of those who were least expecting it.
"A moment spent in love is more precious than all the years of your life spent alone." He held her gaze but in his mind's eye, he saw Tauriel. Her hair loose and flowing behind her as she leapt nimbly from branch to branch, the sun filtering through the canopy as they raced through the treetops. Her clever grin, taunting him over her shoulder.
He gave Nat a small squeeze and released her hand with his vision. "Gimli insisted I give this back to you. He would have come himself but he very adamantly planned on overindulging in whiskey with Eomer before we too departed from Edoras." The fact of the matter was that Gimli had already been drunk well beyond his normal standards by the time he'd produced the earpiece and slurringly declared that Legolas take it with him.
"Thank you, Legolas...for everything."
Elegantly he fisted his hand over his heart and gave her a small curt nod. "I have hope my services have been of some use to you. Fare thee well Natasha."
A long poignant pause held between them.
Neither could say if they would see the other again.