Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. I do not own any of the character, places, names, or anything associated with the works of J.R.R Tolkien or the Lord of the Rings (books or movie, whatever). My characters are Anita, Leila, and Arlandria and that is all.

Author's Note: Thanks to everyone for the reviews, I always look forward to hearing from you guys and your thoughts and feelings about my stories. Keep them coming!

Chapter 9: Stay

The routine had been an easy one to fall into. Every day after breakfast, Anita and Legolas would meet at the front gate and go out to explore the valley together until well into the afternoon hours. He would regale her with stories of growing up in Mirkwood and all the headaches he caused his father, while she would struggle to explain the technology from her world and how it molded society. The change in Anita's demeanor since the daily outings had started was apparent for everyone to see; there were no more sulky days of silence or aimless wanderings about Rivendell. In fact the young girl had even been heard laughing on more than one occasion, but only ever in Legolas' presence. As the days wore on, Elladan's worries and apprehensions about pairing his daughter with Legolas as a guide were soon forgotten.

Summer wore on and the days started to get warmer, not Tucson hot but the warmth mixed with the humidity here made it feel like a towel only half dried in a tumble dryer had been dumped on Ani's head. Trying to wipe that strange sticky feeling from her forehead with the back of her hand, Anita gathered a few materials needed for sketching before heading to meet Legolas. She had determined that today was going to be the day, even if she had to force it out of herself, she was going to draw something. Despite the fun she had been having with Legolas on their daily outings, the desire to draw still hadn't resurfaced. She tossed her pencils and a small sketching notebook into a drawstring backpack along with her refillable water bottle and headed downstairs.

Legolas was standing were he always was by the gate, which had become their designated meeting area. But unlike most days, today Legolas had a horse with him; a big beautiful chestnut gelding with enormous brown eyes.

"Bringing a friend?" Instinctually she held her hand out to the horse for him to smell before she gently started to rub him on the nose.

"The destination I have in mind is far down the valley, well beyond the distance you would desire to walk in a day. I though perhaps to ride instead, and in turn teach you to ride."

Anita made rude sound with her mouth, "I don't need lessons on how to ride."

"You will have to learn as this is the common way to travel between…" Legolas cut himself short as he watched Ani grab the saddle horn and with one swift jump hooked her leg over the horse and pulled herself up in the saddle. The look of surprise he gave her after watching her expertly mount the horse brought a smug smile to her lips.

"I grew up in Tucson dude, there are only a hundred stables. My mom paid for Leila and I to have lessons, I've been riding horses basically since I could hold myself upright. Until I came here I thought it was just one of my mom's weird quirks." Reaching over she patted the horse's neck while she spoke. It had been one of her mom weird things, that both the girls learn to ride and ride often. Coming here to visit the world of her mother's origin though, it wasn't hard to tell why her mother was such an avid horse lover.

"Perhaps then you will allow me the honor of guiding the horse then as to recover my hurt pride?" Ani didn't respond to Legolas except to move herself as far back in the seat as she could, giving him plenty of room to sit in front of her. He easily slid into the saddle in front of her and waited until she had tightly interlocked her fingers around his midsection before guiding the horse out of the gateway.

"I am going to ask you an impertinent question," Legolas said over his shoulder, "but I do hope you will forgive my boldness."

"Well that doesn't sound good," Ani pretended to laugh it off, while in reality Legolas' pretense to the question made her rather nervous.

"Why have neither you nor your sister married, you are both of age?"

She laughed mirthlessly, more a discharge of nervous energy than anything else. "We are barely of age. My mom wasn't real keen on the idea of Lei and I going out on dates, and I think the idea of us getting married young would have given her an aneurism."

"So you courted none of the human men from your…" Legolas trailed off as he tried to recall the word he was looking for.

"High school," Ani finished for him, " And I said my mom wasn't real keen on the idea, I didn't say it stopped us. And what about you? Shouldn't the next king of Mirkwood have a queen at his side?"

Anita had just been teasing him, but Legolas' voice suddenly got very serious. " I have found love to be very fleeting."

"Is that your way of saying you got burned?"

"It is a way of saying I have never been so inclined to get close enough to be burned." Ani didn't have a response for that. What would she have said? 'Buck up champ and love will find you soon'? Not only did it sound stupid but it went against everything that she believed about love. As far as she was concerned, love meant finding someone that didn't irritate the hell out of you and trying to determine if you could live with them for seventy years without pushing a pillow firmly over their face while they slept. So instead, Ani kept quiet and let the conversation drift away, turning her attention instead to the landscape and trying to guess their destination.

They traveled down the valley until the path became too rocky for the horse to cope with. Leaving the gelding in a small patch of greenery to graze on, the pair continued on foot up the rough terrain. After her time here, Ani was getting better at telling time based on where the sun was sitting, and if she had to make an educated guess, they had been traveling south from Rivendell for almost an hour and a half. The further on they walked, the rockier and more hazardous the terrain became, and more than once Anita lost her footing on an unstable rock.

Anita didn't need to ask when they had reached their final point, because as soon as she laid eyes on the pool of water; she knew. Legolas had taken her to a mountain spring, a series of waterfalls cascading over large rocks that fed into a large pool of cool clear water. The water gave way to enormous boulders soaring between ten and twenty feet above the water level, forming the sides that enclosed the body of water. Atop the large rocks were trees, tall and majestic, whose roots had crawled down the lengths of the rocks like skinny broken fingers searching, pleading, to touch the water.

It was those roots, gnarled and mangled, breaking across the surface of the rocks that transfixed her, and she knew they were the exact reason Legolas had brought her here. They were ugly, and broke up the serenity of the scene, but the desperate need to adapt and survive held its own beauty. Ani spared a glance at Legolas who was giving her a knowing smile. Wordlessly, the young girl sat down on the rocky ledge and pulled her sketching materials out of her tiny drawstring pack.

Picking up a hard lead pencil, Ani willed herself to draw, begged whatever cosmic force or god was in control, please let her draw. The pencil tip found its way to the blemish free paper, and ever so lightly an outline started to appear. Legolas sat next to her silently but observant as the picture started to take shape. Ani's skilled hands transferred the world around her to the paper, first in light tones and then darker shades and shadows when she traded up for her charcoal.

The art felt forced, like a singer trying to produce music when their voice was gone, and in her own mind's eye, that was apparent in Ani's work. When she finally set the charcoal tip down, there were many areas of blandness that could be seen in her work. Areas where she could have added more detail, added more life to the roots. Yes the drawing looked lifeless and plain to her, and it was far from perfect or one of her proudest pieces, but it was hers. After weeks of suffering in her own artistic abyss, something had finally taken shape under her guidance. With a small smile of satisfaction, Ani sighed in relief.

"You appear so…happy, when you draw." It was Legolas who first broke the silence around them.

" "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." – Georgia O'Keefe," Ani said plainly as if that explained everything. It was like a weight had been lifted from her soul with this picture, and she felt the strangest sense of giddiness rushing through her veins. "I really can't thank you enough for this, honestly, it's like being let out of a cage after weeks of imprisonment."

Legolas didn't reply right away. A gentle breeze blew by, twisting and lifting Ani's two toned hair in its eternal dance through the branches. Reaching out the elf carefully plucked a few streaks of her violet hair from the winds grasp.

"A flower without color indeed," he said mostly to himself and shook his head before releasing the hair he had been twirling between his fingers. "You are without a doubt the strangest young lady I have ever beheld."

In whatever weird way, Ani knew it was a compliment, and it drew a smile to her lips. Turning away to hide any trace of a blush that might have crept up on her face, Ani spied the perfectly blue waters below them. The sun had hit its zenith, and the combination of blaring light combined with the humidity left an uncomfortable sticky feeling about them, not that anyone would notice on Legolas. Still high from the rush of having completed a drawing, an impulsive idea formed in her head.

"Let's go swimming." The elf's only answer to her statement was to cock a single dark eyebrow at her. But the idea was already in Ani's head, which meant that didn't matter if anyone else was on board, she was going to do it. As it was she was already on her feet, kicking off her sneakers and undoing the clasp on her belt.

"Ani I do not think this is a good idea."

"Laaaaaaame!" The girl retorted in a sing song voice pulling her shirt over her head, and immediately after she pulled down her jeans leaving her standing there in only her bra and panties; a sight that Legolas turned his eyes from as Ani continued to taunt, "Legolas is laaaaaaame."

The rocky ledge they had been seated on was the lowest point in the rocky wall surrounding the water, only three feet from the water line at max. Without a backward glance, the girl slid into the water and plunged below the surface. Legolas sighed with relief when the girl disappeared beneath the water momentarily, at least water would provide some coverage of the girl's body. Anyone that knew the young prince knew that he had a great appreciation for the female form, but he shouldn't, couldn't, think of Ani in that way and it was just easier to avoid the temptation. That withstanding, a swim did sound enjoyable.

Ani resurfaced from under the water to see Legolas unbuttoning his tunic. She opened her mouth to taunt him again, but pulled up short when the fabric slid from his shoulders and her mouth went completely dry. Good god was there anything wrong with this man physically? Not only did he have some of the strongest facial features she had ever seen, but he had a body to match. The sun glinted off his perfectly defined pecs and flat but well-toned ab muscles. As her eyes drank in the sight before her, she realized just what an excellent job his clothing did of hiding his amazing physique.

She tried to swallow, but her throat felt thick and dry, and a tingling sensation had started in the pit of her stomach. Watching the elf slide shirtless into the water, Ani began to beg her own body to behave itself, but she just could not pull her eyes away. Oh please, oh please, oh please she internally pleaded, the last thing she wanted was to be caught ogling Legolas. Something finally broke, if her eyes refused to obey at least her legs would, and Ani plunged herself back under the water.

Resurfacing when she was sure she had herself under control, Ani let out a yelp of surprise to see that Legolas had swam over and was less than two feet from her. She made an attempt to swim backwards as distance herself from Legolas but her back solidly collided with one of the surrounding boulders. Legolas let out a full bodied laugh at her putziness.

Anita wanted to act normal, more than anything she wanted to act normal while she was staring him down. But it was hard to act like that when she could feel her libido starting to act up , and the image of his well defined body still fresh in her mind, and it certainly didn't help that he moved forward to close the distance between them.

"You seem nervous." Legolas said staring her down, and Ani noticed that his eyes were somehow darker. Answer him! She hissed within her own mind. But opening her mouth to reply, nothing came out. All the wit and sarcasm that were readily available to her any other time had abandoned her. So there she was with her mouth hanging ajar, and nothing to say. Legolas reached up and ever so gently pushed her side-swept bangs, which had wetly plastered themselves across her forehead and left eye, out of her eyes, letting his fingers linger for a only a second on her temple. What was there to do but be nervous? She was half naked in a secluded spring with a gorgeous half naked man.

Legolas sensed that the moment had become too intimate, and pulled his hand away from her face and softly laughed to try and lighten up the mood. Even as he started to swim away and put distance between their bodies, Ani still wasn't able to move or speak. A quick glance down at herself though confirmed a fear for her. Despite how normal she had been trying to act, how hard she had been trying to calm the butterflies in her stomach when Legolas' hand had been on her face, the physical evidence what there for the world to see.

Anita was trembling.

Stay- Rihanna