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.
Chapter 32: Silently
Anita knew that the room around her was still silent following Boromir's statement; no one was brave enough to talk while they waited to gauge her reaction. But the girl couldn't hear the heavy silence in the world around her, because it was being drowned out by the cacophonous screaming of voices in her head. He lied…
He Lied?
HE Lied!
HE LIED!
It was almost impossible to swallow around the taste of bile rising in the back of her throat. A sharp and pronounced sting had started to throb at the center of her chest, making breathing a chore. Closing her eyes, Anita tried to focus her strength, to get her body back under control despite the overwhelming urge to freak out. Opening her eyes, she caught site of her hand, white knuckled still clutching her spoon…and shaking violently. In her mind she wanted to set the spoon down carefully and hide her hands in her lap so no one could see the obvious signs of her struggle. But instead the tensed muscles in her arms snapped, she slammed the spoon down, the smack of metal on wood echoing through the silent dining hall.
"Anita…" She didn't know who said her name, and it was the least of her worries. Her hands were still shaking, the voices in her head were screaming of betrayal, and in spite of her efforts, she couldn't get her breathing under control. With a huff, the elf suddenly pushed away from the table; the scrape of the chair on the stone floor was deafening. A single voice, through the waves of cries and screams in her own head, desperately tried to calm her down, to tell her that she needed to control herself…but it was quickly snuffed out by the white noise reverberating in her skull.
Ani didn't even attempt to make up a feeble excuse for why she needed to leave as she pushed back from the table and stood from her chair. Turning and trying to make a quick escape, she stumbled clumsily over her own feet and barely caught herself.
Legolas watched Anita struggle in a losing battle to control her own emotions, guilt clamping his heart in a vice-like grip. As the girl stood up to leave the table, the elven prince shot a withering look that would have melted steel at the human sitting next to him. Truly though, he knew he couldn't harbor anger towards Boromir, it was his own lie that had created this situation. If he had been honest with Ani that morning he wouldn't be sitting here watching this poor girl fight to remain calm. Seeing her stumble as she escaped the awkward situation was the limit of what Legolas could sit by and take without action.
"Anita." He called her name a second time, but again the girl didn't respond, she continued to beeline her way out of the room. Abandoning his spot at the table, the prince threw protocol and propriety to the wind when he stood to follow her. He nearly had to run to catch up with the head start that her short quick steps had given her. As he rounded the corner out of the dining room and into the hall that lead back to the family's rooms, she whirled on him. Before he could react she used both hands to shove him, hard.
"You son of a bitch!" She shrieked as Legolas stumbled back from the force of her push. It had taken all of five seconds for hurt and confusion to evolve into rage. Even though they were out of sight, Legolas knew that they were close enough in proximity that everyone in the dining room could still hear them, but he also knew that trying to shush Ani would only further enrage her.
"Anita please," The prince kept his voice low hoping she would follow suit, " allow me to explain."
"Explain?!" Ani's voice rose another decibel in volume, "Explain how you looked in me the eye this morning and lied to me? Really?! After everything I have been through with this family you thought that lying to me was a good idea?"
"You react like a child whether I tell you the truth or not, so it would not matter what I told you." The sharp crack as Anita's open hand collided with the side of Legolas' face made everyone eavesdropping in the dining hall flinch. For her thin frame, she was deceptively strong; as the burning sensation on Legolas' left cheek proved. He realized a moment too late that perhaps that hadn't been the wisest thing to say. Even without the pain radiating from his face, the look of hurt and betrayal that was trying to hide behind her anger was evident in Ani's expression.
"Go fuck yourself." She sneered before storming away in the direction of her room, leaving him to stand there with a prominent red mark on his cheek; although the slap hadn't stung nearly as fiercely as his guilt currently did.
Despite having alleviated some of her anger when she smacked Legolas, Anita's mood was continuing to deteriorate. Drawing towards her room, every step took effort and far more concentration than is should have. Her head swam with thousands of contradicting thoughts and voices vying for attention, each with its own opinion on the matter; half voiced anger and hurt, the other half indigent and heartbroken. For all the clamoring going on inside her brain, it was nothing compared to the hollowed pain in her chest. Years in taekwondo and more recently training with Glorfindel, Anita had experienced her fair share of physical pain; it paled next to what she was feeling now. It felt like her chest cavity was collapsing on itself, putting enough pressure on her organs to squash them like an overripe tomato. And with each step she took, that throbbing achy pain got exponentially worse.
Ani barely made it inside her bedroom before her legs gave way beneath her and she collapsed against the door, the sturdy ancient wood the only thing keeping her off the floor. It wasn't the pain in her chest, or the tears stinging her eyes that had sucked her strength from her like a succubus, it was the reality that she had trusted him. Unfalteringly. Unwaveringly. She had trusted him. And just like all the others, he had betrayed that trust with a lie.
A slinky voice in the back of her mind whispered harsh words to her already devastated state-of-mind, but they were harsh words that rung with truth too. What right did she have to be mad at his lies? What truth did Legolas owe her anyway? She was after all just his bedmate, a status that she had placed herself in. And obviously that was all she was to him, nothing more than someone to relieve tensions with. She meant nothing to him.
Such wretched thoughts continued to poison Anita's mind beyond the limits of what she could handle. With the last bits of strength she could muster around the sharp hollowed pain in her chest and the talons ripping her mind to shreds, she pushed off the door and stumbled the few steps to her welcoming bed. As she reached for the soft mattress, Anita's legs buckled beneath her and she slumped onto across the top comforter, her breathing becoming inexplicably more ragged. With her weary heart weighing her down, Ani curled up in the bed, drawing her knees up, and let the flood of dark thoughts take her.
It was lying in this position, curled up like a fetus, where Leila found her twin later that evening, after she had given her a few hours to cool down. Lei had been dealing with Anita's vast mood swings and tantrums long enough that she had believed she had seen every manner of poor behavior that her sister was capable of producing. But never in twenty five years had she seen her sister so destitute. Lei expected unbridled rage, worst case scenario she had expected uncontrollable sobbing, but for Anita to check out of reality altogether…well that was new. Ani remained on the bed, brown eyes blankly staring at the wall, her breathing shallow. Leila didn't say anything, but sat on the bed next to her twin, stroking the inky black hair that cascaded over the pillows; expecting that within a few hours Ani would snap out of this trance.
Even with that expectation, Leila wasn't too surprised that Ani's strange mood lasted through the night and into the next day. But when her twin continued to not move, to not speak, not to acknowledge being spoken to, to not eat or drink, to even barely blink or breathe as necessary; Leila grew increasingly concerned. By the fourth full day of this, Lei had nearly lost her mind to anxiety. She knew Ani, better than anyone, and she knew that whatever was wrong….it was serious.
On the fifth day of Ani's special little coma, the fair haired sister had enough. Lei couldn't understand how the rest of the family just turned a blind eye to her twin's obvious suffering. She paced a little bit outside her father's private reading room, trying to build up the gall to go in there and reprimand him. But while Leila was perfectly capable of mounting a good argument based on logic and reason, creating a 'scene' was really more of her twin's forte. And as much as she hated to give her sister's antics credit, such boisterous behavior sure did get the point across. But for her sister's sake, Leila was going to have to find it somewhere deep down inside her, the ability to throw enough of a fit to get her father's attention. In the meantime Lei was wearing a small trench in the floor where she was walking back and forth as she tried to piece her plan together.
Squaring her shoulders, the slim blonde elf boldly marched into the secluded room which was brightly lit by floor to ceiling windows. Her father wasn't alone, which threw a small wrench into her plans, but regardless of Glorfindel's presence, Leila launched into her carefully choreographed tirade.
"How can you stand there and do nothing? Are you truly so cold hearted that you would claim to be ignorant of your own daughter's suffering?" Leila's shrieking voice and flailing arms startled Elladan and Glorfindel both, stopping their conversation midsentence. "Perhaps you haven't noticed, but Anita is upstairs dying right now, and you would sit down here and pretend that nothing is wrong!"
Elladan raised his hand defensively against his child's uncharacteristic outburst. " Leila I assure you I am not blind to Anita's turmoil. But in time it will pass as all things do, she will soon forget about Legolas…."
"She loves him!" Lei cried, cutting her father off. "Ani doesn't have to say it, or even act like it. But I know her, inside and out. I have shared my life with her, from the time we were conceived and through every major event, tragedy and victory alike, up to this point. I know her. And as surely as I know the beat of her heart to the sound of her voice I know that Anita loves him, and that this broken heart will kill her." Her father dropped his hands in resignation, something in her statement finally sinking in. Leila knew that she had him, and all she had to do was hit him with a final zinger to really drive the point home. "For years Anita has accused you of not being there in our youth when we needed you; and time after time I defended you. And yet, in this moment when your daughter needs you the most, here you sit…I guess all along she was right."
She had him. She had him and Leila knew it. Casting his eyes down, Elladan's shoulders slumped in defeat and Leila knew that her argument had struck true, and she had won. Her father abandoned his chair adjacent to where Glorfindel sat to cross to his child. "Perhaps you are right. I will got to her, and speak with her, and see if I can do naught to remedy this situation." Elladan lovingly placed a kiss on his daughters brow before stepping around her to leave the room. Glorfindel stood and came to stand beside the beautiful elleth as she watched her father's receding form.
"Nicely done." The older elf nodded at the girl and winked, to which she replied with a smug and victorious smile.
During the process of having her mental breakdown, Anita hadn't had the clarity of mind to lock her bedroom door when she shut herself away from the world, which had made it easy for Leila to come in and check on her periodically over the past five days. It was also how Elladan easily entered his daughter's room, to find her on the bed exactly how she had been laying for the past few days. Silently he walked over to the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, facing the same direction as Anita was. Painted on the wall was the completed mural of Tucson; its rising mountains, and steep canyons, the hills covered in cactus, all basking in the glow of a glorious Arizona sunset. It was obvious to the elf from all the details that his daughter had lovingly and painstakingly painted the whole scene from a memory.
They sat in silence, the two of them there on the bed, their eyes trained on the view painted before them. Anita didn't even flinch a muscle at her father being in her bedroom, which was normally a big no-no in her book. The silence between them dragged out for several long minutes as Elladan thoroughly mulled over what he was going to say to his little girl. What could he possibly say to console her in her grief, to bring her back from the brink of darkness?
"Your mother used to do this when she was cross with me," The words sprung forth from his lips of their own bidding, "Not with a painting mind you, but she would sit and stare out the window until she was no longer angry. Arlandria once ignored me for two whole days….very impressive."
Still Elladan received no response to his babble. But having no other tactic ready, he continued on. "You are so very like her Anita, so very like your mother in spirit. Leila, now she has the same look about her as Dria had, but you have the very same fighting spirit, the same sense of indomitability that your mother had in her. It was that spirit that I fell in love with." And in a flash the answer came to him. Anita's biggest quarrel with him had always been what it was with Legolas now, the fact that he had concealed the truth from her. And though it would pain him greatly to have to admit the truths that he had worked so hard to hide, it was quite possibly the one thing that he could give his child that she had craved since the day she and her sister had come to Rivendell. He could give her the truth she had sought her whole life.
"I know how greatly you have always desired to know the truth of your birth, and why your life started far away from here. The answer to this was hidden from you for a multitude of reasons, one amongst them being my pride. But I think that ,yes indeed, the time has come for you to know the story of what happened between your mother and I."