Author's note: This was written for a Valentine's fic exchange for IgnobleBard, who requested a Legolas/Elrohir romance fic. I didn't quite fit the bill on the requested "humor and lightness," but it is what it is. This was originally posted on AO3 in February 2021. Images created for the story can be found on my account there.
Note on the piece: This piece is inspired by Pablo Neruda's intensely romantic and haunting, lyrical and imaginative and gorgeous work. The title references one of his sonnets, "Dos amantes dichosos/two happy lovers." I chose to use the Spanish in the title instead of English because the translation doesn't quite do it justice ("the eternal life of the Natural"). Section titles pulled from Neruda are marked with numbers and included in the endnote, as are lines whose imagery or phrases were inspired by a poem. If a line is used directly or nearly verbatim, then those are marked with an asterisk and additionally annotated.
No beta; all mistakes are mine. This is not my usual universe.
An Ode to Time: La eternidad de la naturaleza
Prologue
Legolas son of Thranduil arrived to Valinor, without fanfare, some years after what had been presumed to be the last ship of elves pulled into port. However, Legolas arrived in a boat, not a ship, and he was not accompanied by any lingering wood-elven kin but, instead, a dwarf.
By the end of the first month after the dwarf stepped assuredly onto their sacred land, there was not a soul in Valinor who had not been set a-titter (or who had, at least, engaged in surreptitious eavesdropping of the gossipers). A few were delighted, of course—namely Olórin and Aulë—but for those elves who had never left Valinor again for Middle-earth—and for those who believed they had reason to tilt their heads querulously at Woodelves, in general—the event was particularly salacious.
For Elrohir, it was neither surprising nor salacious, but it did pull at his heart, for he had known Legolas well-enough in Middle-earth to know he would not be here—in Aman, on this sacred, faraway soil—unless death had touched those he loved over sea, and those Legolas loved were the very same Elrohir loved.
And so Elrohir knew definitively, and without asking—he knew before Legolas had even arrived alone, without the dwarf, at his father's halls one pleasant Spring morning—that that hour of Aragorn's departure had come and gone (1), and that Arwen was fled to that far-away place where he would never see her again.
The Memory of You (2)
Legolas had stood at the arch that morning—the one knit with morning glory and clematis, that frames the entrance to my father's favorite garden—silent and nearly blending into the greenery around him, even dressed as he was in uncharacteristic finery. I noticed him before Father did—or, rather, I noticed the elf who had escorted him here and brought him to us, for Legolas himself was soundless—and I beckoned him forward.
He moved silently and swiftly until he stood before us, and then father pulled out a chair beside Elladan and invited him to sit and breakfast with us. Legolas had sat but refused the food, and he fell quiet again. We watched him and he watched us, and then my mother walked into the garden and, arrested, stared.
Father had told her when they were first reunited the story of Estel and Arwen, and the story of the Ring and the war to end wars. I had told her when I arrived of those we had left behind to care for her daughter and her daughter's children and their children's children, to love them and care for them. She did not know Legolas and had never met Thranduil, but my mother is Galadriel's daughter, and there is something in her that sees something's in others that I will never comprehend.
Legolas sprung from his chair as she entered and immediately inclined his head, eyes downcast until she had taken her seat.
My mother sat; Legolas looked up; and no one spoke for a long minute.
Finally, Mother reached for the teakettle and waved a hand at him. "Sit, child, and do not be afraid."
Legolas sat.
She looked up from pouring herself and him a cup of tea. "I know why you are here, Thranduilion. Do not look so forlorn."
He took the cup from her and held it between his hands; he gripped it as if the ceramic's burn might keep him here and in the present. It looked as if it maybe hurt him more to be here, preparing to do the telling, than it did for us to be so sat, preparing to hear it.
He blew on his tea and took a sip, and then he thanked my mother formally, turned to my father kindly, and lowered his eyes as he pulled a thick envelope from an inside-pocket of his fine, umber jacket.
He presented the letter to my parents, and Elladan met my eye across the table. My mother's hand took the letter so that they were, for a moment, stretched across the spread, both clutching at it fiercely, as if so much of who they were was hidden within those pages. But then Legolas let go, picked up his tea, and began his tale.
He spoke for a quarter hour without stopping, and then he paused for some time so we could all read Arwen's letter. I realized vaguely that he wandered around the garden then, touching vines and inspecting flowers, arriving back to his chair at precisely the right moment, for we had all had time to read her words and dry our eyes, to refill our teas and rebuild ourselves.
When he sat back down, he gently restarted his story, hands folded in his lap, such compassion radiating from him as he carefully watched us that he seemed a student of Nienna herself.
"I have more for you," he said when, finally, he had finished, taken his then-cold tea into his hands, leaned into it as if it were the last thing anchoring him. "If you want it."
My father had raised his eyebrows and Legolas continued.
"I have brought with me Arwen's journals, portraits of the children and the family, letters Eldarion and Taurmíriel wrote to their parents when they were abroad—" He paused here for a weighty moment, turned the tea in his hands. "And I have written things, too. I kept a journal once I moved to the woods of Ithilien, and there is an entry every time I visited your family or that they visited me. And I have also written accounts of events specifically for this purpose—to give to you—and some things I collected. Wedding invitations, birth announcements, the like…"
He had trailed off, then, and I watched his gaze drift abstractedly into the distance, until Elladan broke his silence with a sudden, and unintentionally sharp, inquiry—
"Why have you done so thoughtful a thing? You do not know us, beyond what you know of us, due proximity to Estel."
Legolas had turned keen eyes to Elladan then, and I had never before noticed how dark they were, how sea-storm grey—
"I know what it is to have loved and lost, and I know what it is to live with the fear of that. I know what it is to hope for the departure or the arrival of a loved one, while knowing in my heart it is folly."
My mother reached across the table and gently took his hand. He looked at her, and his cheeks burned dark beneath his sun-stained tone.
"It would ease me, I think, to have seen the beauty of the lives of those I love laid before me. And, so, I have attempted to do that for you."
I watched him swallow and drop his eyes to my mother's hand in the middle of the table. He squeezed it back momentarily and then stood, bowed to my father and mother, inclined his head to myself and to Elladan.
"I could not bring them here today, my lords," and he was formal again. "I have the things kept in crates in the house I share with Gimli, on the edge of the wood—" He paused, corrected himself, continued: "Well, it is hardly a forest—that copse of beech, I suppose, yonder." He waves his hand vaguely toward the door behind him. "You are welcome to visit, or send someone with a cart, and I will gladly part with them for you."
He stood stock still for a moment more and then began to turn away—
"Legolas," my father said. "Have you seen your grandfather yet?"
Legolas raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Which grand—"
"Oropher," my father said. "He asks about you. You are the last of his grandchildren he has yet to meet."
"I seek him now, my lord Elrond," Legolas answered quietly. "I have—" he swallowed. "I owe him news of my father."
At that, my father had inclined his head toward me and I nodded.
"Do you know where he lives, child?"
Legolas shook his head.
"And is Gimli with you for company?"
"No, my lord."
I had found myself then standing immediately, offering my services—
"I can lead you there, Legolas," I said quietly. "I know the shortest way; we can be there by nightfall."
He had not moved for a moment, only watched me for a longer minute, eyes narrowing slightly as if he was considering, and then he glanced to my father and back before nodding his head.
"I am in your debt," he had said quietly, and I walked immediately to him, lit a touch between his shoulder blades to guide him out the door. "I am in your debt already and I hardly even know you."
But he was smiling slightly as he said it, as we wound through the gardens and the open and airy rooms to the front steps, and then the rolling beauty of the land stretched out before us, bathed in mid-morning light.
"And woodelves, of sorts, beholden to the Noldor," he murmured, and he caught my eye then. "Well, it does not end well for us."
I had laughed then, deep and truly, and allowed myself to clap him on the shoulder. "I am likely not at all as Noldorin as you think I am." My hand lingered overlong on those muscles wrought by centuries of archery—to this day I swear that he shuddered as I gripped him, that from heart to heart there was a surge and a spark (even if he has made the weakest attempts, every day since, to resist it). "But this is not a time for Elrondion family history..."
He smiled at me oddly then, lips wryly quirked, and I pushed past him toward the stables. I said over my shoulder as he followed:
"And it is us who is in debt to you, Legolas. You have no idea what gift of peace you have provided my parents."
I was met with absolute silence.
.o.
I said that last without thinking, had not stopped to consider or even wonder what he too had lost or stood to lose. I realize now that Legolas had very much a good idea of what he had done, and that he was driven not only by sympathy and compassion but empathy, as well.
You see, it has been over a hundred years now—nearly two—since that conversation in my parents' garden, since I escorted him to Oropher's homestead and stood by his side as he told his tale. It has been nearly two hundred years, and though Valinor may lengthen the lives of mortals, it cannot freeze the March of time.
It has been nearly two hundred years, and I now count Legolas as a dear friend, as close to me as my brother; as one for whom I wake and sleep, as one for whom I have strayed from all I know to support, to pursue—it happened in moments, the turning of days, seasons of years, and then all of a sudden.
So, it burns my heart to watch this happen—
For his father has not arrived to the ports, and his dwarf lays on his deathbed in their house. All I can do is watch him, as he tries his best not to cry.
Book of Questions (3)
We were always different you and I, subcelestial and subterranean, eternal and fleeting:
Tell me, is the last breath empty
or does it open into morning?
Why does rain mine
beneath our roots for clay?
Do you know how deep
under the sand lies stone?
How far do you have
to go to make it to tomorrow?
(Why not give the first day of Summer
a crown for all her effort? And the last day
of Autumn, a pall to hide his inevitable defeat?)
What do we do with a life's hefty ashes?
You made your decision, Elvellon, and leaped from stone to ship, from sea to sacred earth, loyal and ready, braver than I: firmer than any hand to grace Avon except for maybe that of Mahal himself. (4)
A Song of Despair (5)
The first month after Gimli's death is too painful to colorfully recount. I spent weeks sequestered in some far-off corner of this forest with only a grief-mad woodelf and an occasionally-helpful Maia for company. Legolas would see no one—not Oropher, not my father, not his mother's father, not his mother (nor mine), not even Nienna when Olórin called upon her…
He would countenance only myself, and Mithrandir.
It was a dark time, but he suffered through it, and grew, and Olórin patched him back together as he had, apparently, promised to do years ago, when they walked together in Middle-earth.
We eventually emerged from that nest he had built himself in his grief to walk under sunlight—only the two of us—just beyond the boughs of the wood, and I will never forget how he squinted when first he stepped out, how he threw a hand to his face to shelter his eyes, as if burned. He stood there for a moment, collecting himself, and I stood there for a moment, too, collecting him—
Honey hair burnt a ruddy gold, tawny skin cast bronze, hands painted the color of a savage harvest (6) in the burning light. In a blink, humble linen transformed to lustrous silk, such that fine clothes seemed to hug a slim waist and fine hips, instead of the goldenrod, roughspun cotton that shivered as he leaned into a gust of summer breeze.
To say that I did not long for him, even in his grief—that I did not crave or hunger—would be a lie.
Long had we both realized that something grew between us, but long was it denied—
There were abounding rumors that what lay between Legolas and his dwarf was something uncouth and unnatural—an explanation, I think, provided by mothers to their spurned daughters, families who had never known the horrors of anywhere but Aman, and who did not know the intensity with which Middle-earth could bind souls… But I knew the truth of it: that the love they held one another was unparalleled and far too large, overarching, expansive to allow room for any thought of another at all, while still the dwarf lived.
And, so, while I yearned for Legolas and I could see, in him, a growing desire for me—a flicker of love, even, behind his eyes when I would catch them up over the table; or when he would trip over Gimli's intentionally outstretched foot in their small kitchen, flush a rosy copper as I watched; when I would walk with him in the evenings in the trees, having conceded to learn to run the canopy because being closer to the stars eased his aching and anticipating heart—
Well.
It has been a long wait and a long time coming, and it does burn me to know that the happiness that I am sure, eventually, awaits us is only possible because of a mortal death.
But what else in our lives would not have been possible, but for the death of a mortal, or the threat of it? Without Estel, I would not have ridden with the Dúnedain to support him during the war—I would not have met Legolas. Without Aragorn, Legolas would not have gone to the Sea, and he would never have heard the gulls on the shore (and there is no doubt in my mind that, if he had not, he would have stayed happily in Middle-earth to the end of time, fading into the woods of his forest, weaving himself in its heartbeats, become a sprite, a memory, a tale of times forgotten).
And without the death of Estel and Arwen, Legolas would not have found me here in Aman, would not have sought us out, for it was all our shared love for mortals and their choices that brought us together here, in this place. There is absolutely nothing Noldorin about Legolas—barely anything Sindarin about him, either—and he would not have sought us out otherwise, and so—
So it is all the work of mortals that Legolas and I were brought together at all.
This grief is heavy, but if I have learned anything from being a son of Elrond, it is that even in grief there may be joy, and that from darkness into sudden light something better may eventually bloom.
Legolas (7)
I was once sturdy and relatively steady despite what my father often called an 'unfortunate mercurial disposition;' I could once be relied upon to steer and to cut through water, whether uproarious or crystal smooth. I was unfailingly optimistic for the sun shone clear on everything I saw—even when it was dark, I knew it was only the absence of light, only temporary.
But I saw much, very quickly, in those last scores of years in the only world I had ever known, and I had myself ripped from me by the Sea; my ship lost its sails. I was gifted with a friend more beautiful than myself, though, and hooked the heart of me to him, to that steadying thing he was—and is—but it is instead a weight—an eddying anchor—in his absence.
His last few years in that small house we built (in the quiet of this place that rolls like endless summers, whose hills rise gentle, or at least—when less easy—striking, as welcome as a kindly breeze)—
His last few years in that small house we built, I watched him watch me, and watched him watch him, and there were times when the watching were words that came out of his mouth as unexpected things—burst forth and reeling like a murder of highly-focused (and very dwarven) crows—when I was trying to just do the quotidian and simply ignore the passage of time.
I know you, Legolas, and—
Punch the dough, spread the flour, ignore the dwarf.
I have seen the way you look at him, and—
Cross the bridge, throw the net, ignore the dwarf.
Legolas, I am not above—
Turn down the sheets, steady his hand, ignore the dwarf.
Master Elf! When I am gone, you must—
Those times I could not let him finish, I would walk away from his chair, his stone, his cot—away from his bed—and I would leave him behind, abandoned, and take to the trees—
(Those green things tall and slender grey, not so different than the ones I once knew, times and away, backward oversea—)
But our roots are grown; I grew my roots, and too deeply and too fast did they twine with his. I let him crack me like rock to get to the truth of my soul, and he was mortal and burning—
I have burned.
Master Elf, when I am gone back to my home in earth and stone— I did let him say once, for his tongue was always more silver than mine, and I could not always stop him—when my feet have once more gone to fire or to clay, you must not wander among the sea foam and roots.* Do not shatter like a vase as you bring offerings to the stone—
I had tried to make him stop, and pulled my hands from his, but they were stronger and more warm, for grief has touched me even here—
But he let me go then, and turned my cheek toward he who stood some distance away at the counter, uncorking a bottle of wine and pretending not to listen—Elrohir, dark and fair, back straight and steady, ferociously simple after years of rage and recovery—
There will still be the sun and the stars, said Gimli. And there is air and wine greater, here, than earth and of fire—
Elrohir turned with three glasses of wine balanced and awkwardly clutched, and Gimli kept his grip at my cheek and made me watch as he walked to us, careful, dropped to his knees, pressed a glass into my cold and grasping hands—
Eternity, Legolas, is your nature, and there is one here—
And he shoved my leg with his, but not unkindly—
—who would be the other half of you.
My heart was stuttering and cold and I was not ready to imagine an After—
Though only Mahal knows why—
I looked away from them both and tipped up my wine so the world was red through my glass—
—for you are not an easy companion.
As Elrohir pulled me to my feet, then, and settled me into a chair, he was a balm, an anchor, a song like a bass drum, a warmth in my heart that pulled me just slightly farther from the pain of the approaching, that inevitable hour of departure.
And I hated him for that, for his implacable and unreserved succor…
.o.
When Elvellon died, a few weeks later, Elrohir was both cave and cage—an anchor for my wandering kite: he let me break my wings upon the steadiness of his soul. Over and over again I shattered, and—over and over again—he weathered my violent despair and handed me back the pieces.
It is more slow and delicate; he is more slow and delicate—he burns not like a bonfire but a star spun close, yet tender as a guide and firm as a mariner for those who are lost—somehow, even here—still here!—at sea.
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away? (8)
I had considered, as Gimli aged, who here in Valinor besides Olórin might support Legolas through the inevitable, for I knew I was not enough. I had seen and raised and loved many a Dúnedain child I would lose, but it was not this… Compulsion. I could not even begin to understand the type of love he and Gimli shared: a love that compelled an elf to fight a disorienting and disabling longing for over a century, that compelled a dwarf to build and board a boat, to sail somewhere he did not even know was real—to risk it all, for one another.
So, I had wondered: Who here in Valinor might understand such a pain? Who might ease his suffering, might walk him through the darkness?
For his is a darkness not of rage, as was mine for my mother, but rather a lack. Whereas my loss, backward oversea, had been like pinesap and oxygen to flame, Gimli seems to have been Legolas' minder, and so he burns now on the inside with no one to tend him. He is one moment blazing and the next smoldering and suffocated, and then he will flare and peak once again. Elladan and I, at least, burned steady for years until we burned ourselves back to equilibrium, but Legolas? Perhaps it is the wood-elf—or perhaps it is just that he has always been more water and leaf than fire or spark, and he does not know how to manage his soul's compulsion to manufacture and chase the loss of Gimli's flame—but he has become unsteady. There is a disconnection, now, from that light he once told me touched everything he saw, regardless of the time of day, for it is lit from within, Elrohir—everything in this world that has been touched by the light of the star or the sky? It takes it in and projects it back out, if we are careful enough to see it, and the light of living things can be woven and lifted beyond the scope of—
I often do not understand him, and as little as I actually am mannish in blood, I frequently feel nearly fully so when in conversation with a woodelf as utterly Mirkwoodian as he—Rhovanion grew them differently, I think, than anywhere else in Arda. (He is grown through with green and gold that tilt him and turn, that twist up and out of him like vines—he is, normally, water to my steel.)
So I had considered Celebrimbor at first, for his love of Narvi—for how many elves had so loved a dwarf as they?—but I decided that one so directly Feanorian might not be well-received by a descendent of Doriathrin refugees (...fair to Celebrimbor's character and deeds or not), and so I quickly discarded that.
I was back to the beginning, and yet—
Beleg had not even occurred to me.
Some stretch of time after all that obsession and hand-wringing and pondering, Legolas and Beleg accidentally met. (Or perhaps it was by fate—one never knows in Aman, something Legolas has found a distinctly unsettling thing to accept). It happened as we wandered, he and I, toward Valmar and the Sea. We sought together solace or the memories of adventure in Middle-earth, for as pleasant as Aman is, we still have much relearning to do, of how to live life without threat of war.
It was just almost a full moon ago—the day he met Beleg, in fact—that I finally convinced him to leave his longknife at home, to travel only with his bow, and to do so not for need of protection but for comfort, and for food. It turns out that habits born of millenia living under siege do not fall away overnight, and they are not entirely eased, either, through establishment in a realm of purported peace—the bands of scattered Sindar and the folk of the Wood have had a harder time than the rest of us forgiving the bloody mistakes made even here, and the memories of betrayals and sacrifices burnt into them in Beleriand and backward oversea heal in them still, even now.
(I have been more patient with him in this than I ever expected myself to have the capacity to be.)
But Legolas has met Beleg, and an odder friendship I have never imagined (which is significant, considering I spent the past two hundred years observing Legolas and a dwarf). They met a month ago, and Beleg has been twice a week to visit since. I have heard them talking late into the night: their words are full of whispers of the intoxicating drunkenness of mortals, the vehemence of their living, how one runs after them like a wind spun behind wildfire, the heart rushing forward at a run even as the body moves slow and steady and sure, as time moves by less like a stream and more like a slow patter of raindrops about them—
(I have wondered, sometimes, if this is how my sister felt with Estel, as the days built up behind them and the world stretched on before. One day, I will ask Legolas, for I learned when he first came here, from the journals he gave to my family, that they were close by the end, two elves bound tight to a city of stone.)
But Beleg has visited today, and so I have spent the morning through the afternoon, into the early evening, watching a Sindarin elf of the First Age and a marginally-, barely-Sindarin elf of the Third challenge one another to increasingly more daring feats of archery. They are so different to watch it almost makes me laugh, but I discovered within a week of knowing Legolas more intimately that to laugh at a woodelf is to paint a target on one's back—one has exactly one chance to underestimate a woodelf and then, if you are lucky, you will have one chance more to overgeneralize them before the consequences begin to rain upon you.
(Watching the elves native to here—or those who established themselves ages ago—react to the Silvans as they immigrated in quantity at the beginning of the Fourth Age has been one of the more entertaining experiences of my life. Generally, as I did, they only underestimated them once and, while Legolas was the last of them to come, he somehow managed to still take them off guard—I am convinced it was the dwarf.)
I have not gone home since Gimli died, though Elladan has come by to visit, and he brings teas and cakes from our mother for Legolas. Legolas often blushes and is flattered. Elladan asks me each time: Do you know what you are doing, brother? This one, he is hurt, like a bird with cracked wings.
But that is not what I see when I look at him, for he has—this past month—bloomed himself out, bit by bit, birthed himself slowly in a difficult but resolute process, exposed himself incrementally, intrepid and brave—
And Elladan trusts me, and so he has left me here, even though Legolas refuses to sleep beneath the cottage's eves, and I have taken to resting in a dwarf-sized chair, for Gimli's room is untouched and I will not sleep in Legolas' bed, without his permission, or without him, and I do not know why I cannot ask.
Time passes strangely here, however surely it still marches along, for it is suddenly late, now. Legolas and Beleg lay on the ground, stretched side by side, heads just barely even with the edge of the wood, and they are murmuring in quiet voices, stopping here and there to have the other repeat some word, for Beleg's Sindarin is Doriathrin through-and-through, and Legolas' Sindarin is, arguably, hardly Sindarin at all.
I do not move from where I lean against the cottage built centuries ago by elf and dwarf; I only listen. Legolas' arms are crossed behind his head, and he is smaller than he was with his energy today, in a way that speaks to improvement.
"If I might ask you a question, Cúthalion?" I hear him inquire after a brief quiet.
"You may."
"I have always wondered, since I was small," he says slowly, and he has pulled his legs up toward him so they peak like a mountain; his head turns toward Beleg carefully. "Why you chose the blade you did, from King Thingol, when there were so many you might have taken instead."
Beleg turns his head, too, toward Legolas, and he is steady as stone, old as the Sun, and Legolas seems sylph and wild under his pinning gaze: "Why do you ask?"
Legolas is undaunted, which is one of the reasons I have come to love him. "I think I would not have chosen a cursed blade," he is saying, "and surely you have asked yourself the same, since it led, in the end, to your death?"
It is not a question I would ask, as tied up, as it is, with Túrin, but I suppose that is the entire premise of this strange friendship, their love for mortals, however different their circumstances.
"Do all your folk inquire so forwardly about the deaths of friends, to their face?" He has turned his head back to the sky, and Legolas mirrors him. "Or is this a peculiarity of only you, Oropherion?"
"I am from Taur-nu-Fuin, a name inspired by the very place that felled you—" His voice is strong and steady, more so than I have heard from him since he spoke his last words to Gimli, calm but unyielding as heartwood as he eased him on that chosen day of passing. "I would give much to understand the deaths of my kith and kin, who fell under Darkness, and when I meet them again, I cannot promise I will not ask them."
There is quiet and the rising of cricket all about us, birds on the wind, settling like marchwardens in the tree above them.
"But no," he says more quietly. "It is not just me."
Beleg is quiet for a while and then he has sat up and is patting Legolas on the knee as he leans back on his hands, watching the darkening sky— "The First Age was long ago, child. We made many mistakes, then, so that you and your kin might not have to, later. Though I am not entirely sure you have always listened."
I can tell that Legolas is not satisfied, but he only sits up, too, turns to look at me and beckons me over; my heart swells.
"I have read the history books, as well, Legolas, and we—all our kin, from Doriath to Mirkwood to Alqualondë and back—we have all made choices that we might not have had we thought more deeply on those who came before."
Legolas stares, and I stare. I do not understand what he means, in this case—so indirect an answer to so direct a question—but Beleg only turns away, lifts his bow to his shoulder and begins to walk.
"Wait! Cúthalion!" Legolas cries, for sometimes words burst from him before he can stop himself. He has jumped to his feet and I steady him.
Beleg does not turn and I barely hear him say: "All of us have lost much, Laegolas, Thingolion." Well. "And some of us forever. So it pains me to think that you waste what lies so clearly, ready, before you."
Legolas is quiet, but his hand comes up to rest on mine, and he is leaning into me as he ponders—
I do not always like how this makes me feel, when he moves to me, unconsciously.
I do not like that I like that he is so different than I, whipcord lean with strength held within, hidden and potential, like a spring.
I do not always like how I feel when I realize how good it is to share almost no part of me with someone else, neither histories nor kin nor blood (apart from our love for mortals, the loss of those we love, lives lived faraway and backward oversea).
I do not like how I feel when he leans into me and is tucked like a thing I have known my whole life; that I like that I am broader but no more strong; that it is his cheek that rests on my shoulder when he leans and that he does not have to bend at all to fit—
"I will see you, perhaps, tomorrow?" Beleg is calling, and he does turn this time, walking away, backward. "You should like to meet Oromë and Vána, I think, wood-elf."
And then the sun is dipping, and he is gone.
But, immediately, then, Legolas is gone, too.
He has swung himself into a tree and he is off, an arrow and flower in flight, and in the light his wings are fused*(9); he is lit burnt and sharp as he disappears, a force unreckoned, to never suffer underestimation, for he is more than his queerness and tenderness, his love of living things, his muted light—
He is, yet, an elf on fire, and he can run for hours when he is like this, before it burns him out.
Beleg, I dearly hope, will turn out to be our reckoning.
The sun is below the horizon, and it is dark.
Legolas
Beleg has come here only once since that day he forced me to look at Elrohir for what we had become, sunk into one another's lives over the course of centuries, two so different who had become so close—
It is, perhaps, the kind of person I attract, or am attracted to. An opposite.
But so has it ever been with my father's line: my father and a Silvan, my grandfather and my Danian grandmother—
I suppose it is no surprise, then, that I found myself, first, titillating the classes with a dwarf; and, next, I will give all my grandparents a shock nearly as large with this almost-elf I have somehow tangled myself up with, tied as he is on every line—one way or another—with early war and the Silmarils, with the high heroics of Beleriand and beyond; and he is as mixed with those High-elves as I am with those who turned and were bled, who seeped into the bedrock and grew the soul of Middle-earth, outward and up over millennia—
I have thought on Cúthalion's unspoken longing, and I have yielded.
When I disentangled myself from the trees that night—after I had burnt myself utterly out—I found Elrohir waiting for me at the edge of the wood. His fire was softer than mine, yet eager, steady.
We kissed for the first time then, and I did not pull away.
There Is Still Fire in Your Tombs (10)
"What shall we do about your cottage?"
"It is not my cottage."
"What shall we do about—" I wave my hand, gesture toward the far-off place where Gimli lays entombed and say, instead, with slightly more intention— "your cottage?"
He stands for a while and does not speak. Eventually, he tilts his head to the side and looks at me oddly: "Elrohir… I think I should like to burn it."
Legolas goes inside for the first time in weeks, and he returns some time later with a trunk stuffed full of sundry things, a pack on his back, a quilt slung over his shoulders, baking pans and knives held pinned in his armpit, gripped loosely in one hand—Gimli's axe pulls heavy at his thin, leather belt.
We do not speak and I only watch him for a while, standing still and tall.
"Why?" I eventually say.
"Gimli would have liked it—dwarves, and battle..." he explains vaguely, and he shrugs, and then he is looking away again, eyes drawn always to the edge of the wood. He is dropping his things, sitting on his trunk, looking up at me with hair streamed back and dark eyes wide. "And besides, I think…"
I kneel before him and take up his hands, and he fits himself into me—
"I think I am ready."
That night—as autumn begins to raise its aging head—Legolas opens his trunk, pulls out his most personal journals, opens himself. I hold him close and listen to stories of their past, and we have a mighty bonfire.
A Long Day the Color of Honey and Blue (11)
A long day the color of honey and blue,*
autumn leaves eddy in the tides left behind.
You are pale against the sand
and I, darker, cover you.
It is slow and it is careful,
for are we not new in the doing
for how long we have craved?
My hands on you are strange like this.
Love, these are words that bridge the gap:
A wing on wind is the same however we say it aloud—
honey, blue, seafoam, sand.
Are words enough to say: This, is tender gold,
honey splashed the sky; blue like waves,
pulsing grey, two endless, darkling eyes?
Your Hands and Mine Will Steal the Stars (12)
I owe Gimli much, I think.
For Gimli corralled the impulses in Legolas' wild heart, wore him down a bit and aged him, matured him, before he was handed off to me. He is long gone but his memory is immutable, for all he always told Legolas it was his job in their life to be the one who sprang eternal…
His mortality made them burn with a vehemence that I know in my heart Legolas will never find again. When Gimli died, some part of him did, too, but I think I am all right with that now. I spent long years driven by an intensity I did not always understand, and the subtler quiet that has settled on Legolas these years as he has recalibrated… It has made him even more attractive to me than before. Gimli made it possible for us to be alone now, the two of us, without grief nipping at our heels like an uninvited voyeur—he made it possible for us to be truly two, and one when we are at our closest.
This evening, we are at our closest, subcelestial, the world wide and sprawling around us—
It is autumn one hundred years after Gimli's death, one hundred years after Beleg laid the truth before us, walked away, and made us choose.
It is three hundred years since Legolas first arrived here in that small boat with a dwarf at the helm.
He is open now and fruitful, laughing. He is autumn gold and savage harvest, held tilted back and neck exposed, strong arms bare as I watch him—
His humor is cutting, I have found, and he is more bold with his body than I expected after watching him rebuild from ash for years over years.
"Come here?" he is saying, and he is a burst of laughter like swallows startled from repose at the cliffs—
His arms are open and I fall upon him, let him roll me over with the fluid motion of an effervescent spring creek, tuck himself where he belongs. His hair is a sunset that burns when he leans back over me; he touches my cheek, runs a hand through my hair and says:
"Elrohir, you are the gentle, coming night, easy and kind—"
But I do not let him finish.
These past few years we have learned how to fit, and with his hands in mine he has seen again the light of every thing—as he once told me before, the light we hold within ourselves and push from the inside out—and I have seen it also, I think, for the first time.
He burns soft and liquid as his fingers weave in my hair, as I take him at shoulder and at waist and roll him, so that I am no longer beneath. He is laughing, and the broomgrass rustles around us—the rest is lost to time but together we rise, and the night drops fast like a curtain.
Epilogue
Thranduil son of Oropher arrived, without fanfare, some years after what had been presumed to be the last boat—of elf and dwarf—to pull into port. However, Thranduil arrived in a ship, not a boat, and was accompanied by a handful of lingering wood-elven kin; they breached the horizon at dawn-light.
Unlike his son's reception some four hundred years prior, however, his was excited, warm—a celebratory shock.
Should this have been possible? A few elves did titter, as they stopped in their business of ushering children to tutors and breakfast. To come so long after the last ship sought the Straight Road? Is it not closed?
But Thranduil had stepped off the ship and walked immediately toward a group of elves clad in greens and brown, vibrating with excitement, autumn bronze at the port—
A head of wild gold was upon him before he had even found who he sought—"I thought you had faded into memory!"
Hand on head, hand to back, words muffled in ear: "If you could do it with your dwarf, my son, a King shall not be stopped simply because he must wait some time for his Folk to find eternity."
A tall elf had stepped forward as Legolas pulled back, dark where he was fair, fair where he was dark; he bowed, sunk to his knee, offered up his hand to the Elvenking—
"Elrohir, do not be ridiculous—" Legolas hissed, yanking him up by the arm and brushing the dust off his robes. "No need to grovel to prove your point about the equal status of the Nandor. What a display—"
And Thranduil laughed more, then, than he had since he shared a meal with his youngest son, before he watched him ride away with a dwarf for the very last time, what felt like ages and ages and ages gone.
"Child, you seem happy."
Two smiles, two hands clasped, one rising bloom of truth, a kiss pressed to a ruddying cheek—
"I seem so—" Came the answer, and his eyes caught the sea for only a moment, and then he had returned, steady as steel, backward over sea— "Because I am."
"Come, my Lord," Elrohir said quietly. "I know the shortest way to your father's; we can be there by noontime."
And so the departures had come and gone, and the sun rose—finally—on a sacred land, eternal.
FIN
Footnotes:
1. Inspired by "La canción desesperada / Song of Despair"
2. Section title from "La canción desesperada / Song of Despair"
3. Section title from Neruda's book "Book of Questions;" poem form inspired by the same
4. Form inspired by "Ode to a chestnut on the ground"
5. Section title from "La canción desesperada / Song of Despair"
6. "Savage harvest" inspired by "Soneto XI (Tengo hambre de tu boca, de tu voz, de tu pelo ) / Sonnet 11 (I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair)
7. Gimli's voice is inspired by three poems here, "Love for this book," "La canción desesperada / Song of Despair," and "Soneto XLVIII (Dos amantes dichosos) / Sonet XLVIII (Two happy lovers). The one marked with an asterisk indicates that I adapted a line directly from a poem; it can be found in "Love for this book."
8. Section title from "Poema X (Alma apretada) / Poem 10 (Clenched Soul)
9. The description "an arrow and flower in flight, and in the light his wings are fused" is lifted almost directly from "The Flight"
10. Section title from "La canción desesperada / Song of Despair"
11. Section title from "Love for this book." The line marked with an asterisk is directly from the same. Also, the poem form for this section is based on Neruda's thematic and rhythmic adaptation of the traditional Petrachan sonnet.
12. Section title adapted from "In the night we shall go in"
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