Disclaimer: I know I keep forgetting this part. None of the characters are mine. The flashback scene is from RotK. No profits, just fun.
The night was quiet in Gondor. A breeze stirred fitfully outside the walls, then was still. The air was warm and thick. Summer constellations spanned the cloudless sky.
Aragorn slept, in a semblance of peace.
Legolas and Arwen sat like small children by the glass doors that opened to a grand balcony. Her legs were drawn up to her chest, and her chin rested despondently on her knees. He twisted so he was lying on his good side on the carpet, head cradled in the crook of his elbow.
"What made him do that?" Her voice was soft, exhausted by tears that she never let fall.
Legolas moved in the briefest of shrugs. He was nearly asleep from the warm night and the weariness of the days events. "Dream," he mumbled.
"Will it happen again? What did the Dream look like, Legolas?"
He grunted in reply, not wanting to take the effort to speak. He was so sleepy….
"Legolas!" Arwen reached out and shook him gently. "Please."
He sighed, and rolled over on his back, so that he could see both her and Aragorn. He had never been able to deny Arwen anything. The movement helped him wake a little, and he obligingly studied the problem they faced.
"There is…something evil in there. Controlling him, I think. How?" Legolas shrugged again, and made a non-committal sound. He really was too sleepy to be thinking hard.
Arwen's eyes, huge with hurt and fear, urged him on.
"I don't know what it wants. I thought evil was gone, Arwen. I thought that's what Frodo gave up…everything…for. If there's a new evil, will there be a new Fellowship? The heroes of the last Age have faded. No Elves. No more Elves," he mused drowsily. "Hobbits? Dwarves? I don't think they want to come out into the world anymore. Jus' men, now," he stated, nodding.
"How long will your light hold back the shadows from him, Legolas?" Arwen asked, the tenseness in her voice sharply contrasting with his sluggish tone.
"'Bout day. Two?" His eyes slid closed. He didn't see the urgency. They could do something tomorrow. Some rest would help him think more clearly, anyway, Legolas thought as his breathing grew deep and rhythmic.
Something brushed across his lips. A cup, with a pungent smelling liquid. Legolas turned away from the bitter aroma that hung in the air.
"Drink, Legolas," Arwen urged, and he obediently took a small sip.
It tasted foul and had an oily texture, and seemed to vanish from his tongue before he could even swallow. Fire roared through his body, scorching away any tiredness that he had had. His eyes snapped open, and his thinking was no longer fuzzy.
"What was that, Arwen?" he exclaimed, sitting up. Legolas couldn't understand why he had been so tired. Energy buzzed in him.
"Sycaroot. I used to take it to help me study the Dream. It combats the fatigue, in a fashion."
Legolas knew of sycaroot only by name. He was fascinated by the herb. The cup was tiny, and he hadn't had more than a taste, but he felt as though he had rested for months. Arwen had been a master of the Dream, like her father. In fact, she had been his teacher for many years, when he had been a scholar.
"A thought occurred to me," he said suddenly. "The Dream is said to be only accessible by Elves. Yet there is another presence there, certainly not Elvish. And I believe that Aragorn can travel the Dream too, if imperfectly."
Arwen's eyes grew wider in surprise. "He has not said a word of that to me!"
Legolas shook his head. "I don't think he knows. Or, he might know, but he's not doing it consciously. It's more likely that he's entering it through another medium."
"There is nothing that can reach the Elven Dream save an Elvish mind!" Arwen said, shocked.
"Elves have always thought of the Dream as Elven. But what if it's not, Arwen? What if it's just a place, like Gondor or Arnor? There to be inhabited, but also there to be conquered, if you will."
Arwen bit her lip, as she hadn't in thousands of years, trying to digest this knowledge. "What else could reach it, then?"
"I think Galadriel's mirror and the palantir of old used the planes of the Dream. But where Galadriel's mirror acted as a window, the palantir acted…act as a gateway."
"Aragorn…he is the Master of the Orthanc! Surely it could not turn on him!"
Legolas remembered the day that the King Elessar had struggled with the Orthanc Stone.
***flashback***
Together they went back into the Burg; yet for some time Aragorn sat silent at the table in the hall, and the others waited for him to speak.
'Come!' said Legolas at last. 'Speak and be comforted, and shake off the shadow! What has happened since we came back to this grim place in the grey morning?'
'A struggle somewhat grimmer for my part than the battle of the Hornburg,' answered Aragorn. 'I have looked in the Stone of Orthanc, my friends.'
'You have looked in that accursed stone of wizardry!' exclaimed Gimli with fear and astonishment in his face. 'Did you say aught to - him? Even Gandalf feared that encounter.'
'You forget to whom you speak,' said Aragorn sternly, and his eyes glinted. 'Did I not openly proclaim my title before the doors of Edoras? What do you fear that I should say to him? Nay, Gimli,' he said in a softer voice, and the grimness left his face, and he looked like one who has laboured in sleepless pain for many nights. 'Nay, my friends, I am the lawful master of the Stone, and I had both the right and the strength to use it, or so I judged. The right
cannot be doubted. The strength was enough - barely.'
***end flashback***
Arwen's hands flew to her mouth in horror.
"Aragorn was right," Legolas continued. "He had the strength to best Sauron in that encounter – just. But he kept throwing his strength against the palantir. He is untrained, and strength in that field cannot be gained by practice. Slowly, the darkness that lies in the palantir has been soaking into him. The first battle was hard - "A struggle somewhat grimmer for my part than the battle of the Hornburg," he said to me. The final battle will be a thousand times harder."
A sob came from Arwen, but she took a deep breath, and refused to let the tears flow.
"I will not cry while yet there is hope," she said, sounding like the Arwen of old. "The palantir will be destroyed immediately."
Legolas shook his head again. "Wormtongue threw it at us from the top of Orthanc, and it did not so much as chip. I am thinking it needs to be destroyed in a similar way to the Ring – let what made it unmake it." He fell silent. "But we have not that strength left in the world, even if I knew where the Orthanc could be unmade."
"What can we do, then?" Arwen was grim. She refused to let the thought of defeat enter her mind.
"I honestly do not know, Arwen. Tonight I will enter the dream again, and hope to find some better answers there. But one thing is clear to me." Legolas looked at Arwen steadily. "He cannot remain in Gondor. Not while the…shadow…plagues him. He is a danger to Gondor, and to himself."
He expected tears, or heartbreak, but Arwen stood proudly in the moonlight. "As long as you bring him safely back to me, Legolas."
He wordlessly reached out to her, and the two old friends embraced, sharing silently their pain.
Arwen did not think she could bear the thought of Aragorn leaving. But the thought of him being overtaken by shadow helped her keep strong.
Legolas was surprised. "You are not arguing with me? I would have thought you would have insisted to come, at the least."
"I do not argue when you speak sense, Legolas Greenleaf," she retorted, sounding haughty.
"I do not recall that being the case when we first met," he countered, and they laughed softly together.
"Could we ever have imagined, as children, that this was to be our fate?" Arwen mused quietly.
Caught like leaves in the whirlpool that is Aragorn, thought Legolas, but he did not speak. Fated to love him, fated to die for him.
And Arwen did not notice Legolas' silence because inside, her heart was weeping for the man that she loved more than life itself.