Author's Note - Thanks for all the great reviews, people, they were quick comin', too, so the update is also quick-coming! ^_^ I was so happy! I almost didn't post that fic at all. Anyway, now this has to be more than a two-shot, because I have to bring Aragorn back. But not in this chapter.
Update: The masses have spoken, so the No Slash! people win out. Which doesn't really bother me all that much. I really like both ways equally. And it was originally written as a friendship fic, anyway, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. As with Eowyn and Legolas, well...you can jump to your own conclusions. *grin*
Shameless Plugs - However, if you are into the slashier stuff, check out "Longing for Lorien" (still mostly Aragorn/Arwen, but has some intimate Legolas/Aragorn moments in there too that can be interpreted in a variety of different ways) and if you're adamantly non-slash, check out "Mortal of Imladris", which is a slightly AU Estel story centering out on how he and Arwen met, and what caused him to leave Rivendell to become a Ranger. It's promising to turn into a melodramatic romance, but I digress. As always, reviews are appreciated, no matter how brutal!
Rohan's Grief
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
During the night, Legolas barely moved. Once, he closed his eyes and shook his head, bringing his hand up briefly to touch his forehead in a gesture of exhaustion, or deep distress. Sometime after the moon had risen, he heard quiet footsteps behind him. They were too fearless and confident to be those of any woman-most of the Rohan people were still very afraid of elves, doubtful at the least and frightened at the worst-but the footsteps were too light to be those of any man, either.
"Eowyn," he said, his eyes not leaving the plains. The moonlight shone on the grasslands like snow rippling in the wind. A great white ocean, as far as the eye could see. The mountains were black against the sky, and very far away, only a ridge on the horizon. The little rivers were like ribbons of silver inlaid into the ethereal landscape. Legolas found himself wondering how a place so wild and beautiful could be found outside of an elvish realm.
"Master Legolas....Master Gimli told me I'd find you up here." Her voice was slightly startled behind him; it was quiet, and solemn as a pallbearer's.
"You have."
"I brought you something to eat. And some things to tend that wound. Since you didn't seem inclined to come back, I came out to attend you."
"I'm not hungry. The wound is nothing." His voice was flat, but full of images, dead fields under a bleak gray November sky, wilted blossoms, sadness as taut as a silver wire, as tightly drawn as a bowstring.
"You aren't the only one who suffers, Legolas."
Legolas turned his head at this, and found himself absently dismayed to see Eowyn gazing at him with tears in her eyes, tears of grief for Aragorn and the others who died at the Gap, which were expected, and tears of pity for him, which he did not want or need.
Legolas suddenly realized something, looking at Eowyn. Her hair was undone, wisps of it sticking to the tears on her pale cheeks. He sensed the dawning, doomed love Eowyn had felt for Aragorn, and was sorry for it. Sorry that it could never be. Sorry that Aragorn had loved Arwen so much, and sorry that Arwen was fool enough to fall in love with him. His falling would cause grief to more people than he could count.
Eowyn's voice was soft when she spoke again. "What are you going to tell the one who gave him that jewel you're wearing?"
"...I do not know." Legolas, really, had never thought about it. He saw death every day, dead orcs, dead fell, dark things, dead Men whose names he did not know and did not want to know. Names were secret, full of power, and naming something gave you reason to grieve over it. He didn't know why this was different.
Your brotherhood is supposed to be different, he thought. Boromir wasn't supposed to be killed because Legolas had touched him, talked to him, smiled at him, teased him, and the same went for Aragorn. They were inside the magic circle of the Fellowship, which meant that they were beyond hurt. Or at least were supposed to be. But he had began to realize something when Gandalf fell into the abyss, Gandalf, who had always seemed so ageless to him. He had truly realized when poor Boromir died hard, bleeding and coughing his life out onto fallen leaves off the banks of Amon Hen, Aragorn weeping unashamed over him, kissing the Gondorian's cold, pale brow, that what was supposed to be and what really was were two very different things.
"Will you send word to her?"
Legolas did not answer. He did not think he would be the one to tell Arwen. He knew that she would die of grief if she knew. He knew, and he felt almost as if he was dying himself. If he was forced to it, he would keep the Evenstar and tell her that Aragorn had disappeared in battle. Damned if he knew how he was going to say such a dishonorable, dispicable, cowardly lie and look her in the face. He knew deep in his heart he couldn't. She would read his eyes like a book.
// He's *not* dead! //
"No," he answered finally. "I won't. He isn't dead."
"Legolas-"
He looked up at her silently, saying all he needed to say with a glance. Eowyn was miserable, wanting so much to help, wanting to comfort him and to be comforted by him, but he had no comfort to give. All his will was bent on Aragorn's return. He had nothing left for a jilted princess. In his mind's eye, he saw Aragorn, tangled against the warg, skidding over the side of the cliff. Then the warg had been gone. And then Aragorn had been gone. Why hadn't he seen it? Why hadn't he seen that his dearest comrade was in peril?
"He would not have wanted you to suffer, Legolas."
Legolas looked back at her, shaking his head a little. "If he's dead, as you say, then what he wanted or did not want doesn't matter anymore, does it?" He sighed silently, turning back to gaze over the plains. "Don't you understand, Princess? If Aragorn, son of Arathorn, is dead, then hope is dead. And nothing remains to save your people but hope. If he does not return, none of us will live to see the new moon. So I must wait and watch."
Eowyn was silent. She stood beside him, tears showed on her face in silver moonlit tracks. She stood beside him, uncomforted.
After a few minutes, she spoke again, her eyes never leaving the bottomlands. "You were close to him?"
"...I watched him grow up. I taught him what he knows." He stood still again, and Eowyn was unnerved by that utter stillness; it was like death. "And I will stand here," he said calmly, "until Aragorn returns."
Eowyn was crying harder now, bringing a hand up to cover her face. Legolas was sorry for it, and looked over at her, observing her grief with a detachment that almost resembled cruelty. His own grief was too heavy to bear, without adding hers on top of it. She didn't just grieve for Aragorn; she cried for all of her people. Somewhere in his heart, Legolas knew he was not strong enough to shoulder such sorrow, his and hers. His heart would break with it.
Legolas did not try to comfort her. He only let her lean on him, let her cling to him desperately, as if he was the last harbor in a terrible storm, and reached forward tentatively to brush the hair back from her face.
"My lady," he said, trying finally to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture suddenly, pulling away from him as if he had grown hot to the touch. She had no intention of listening to him. Her grief had given over to fury, and she was blazing with it.
"Never mind, master elf," she said, her voice bitter with grief. Legolas could almost taste it, like tears. "You have no idea what I'm talking about. You have always been immortal, and he never was. You think just because he grew up with you, just because he belonged to you Elves, that death could never touch him. Well, you were wrong!"
Legolas recoiled as if he had been slapped. And realized that there was a sting of truth to her words. It was true; Aragorn had been raised among the Elves. He had been Hope to them for so long, that Legolas assumed he could never be hurt. He was a star that could never burn out.
She was not finished. She advanced on him like a storm, shoving him from the position he had stood at for many long hours. Dimly, Legolas understood that such daring wrath was much easier for her to express than anguish. She pounded on his chest, weeping and not knowing why. Her hands beat on his chest like the wings of little birds, almost unfelt, even though she put all her strength behind them. "Why don't you cry!? Why don't you cry for him, you callused thing! Why don't you sing your silly sad songs for all of them?! Why do you just stand there, like some pitiless breathing statue!?"
Legolas let her strike him, not moving, only looking at her, barely feeling the blows. After a few seconds, he grabbed her wrists gently, being careful not to hurt her, and let her struggle, crying and cursing him, for a few moments more, before he let her go. Eowyn turned away from him, sobbing harshly.
After awhile, her sobs quieted. She leaned down and pick up a rag she had brought, soaked with some sort of seeped herbal water that was supposed to help his wound heal. She turned back towards him, dabbed at his arm fiercely, causing him to wince. "Death is natural, Legolas. It happens to everyone," she added, her voice more quiet, hitched with the aftermath of her sobs, but her eyes were still furious, defying Legolas's calm refusal to accept the inevitable.
"Stop it," Legolas replied, looking back over at the plains, ignoring her attempts to nurse him. "You're not making any sense, and only upsetting yourself."
Eowyn didn't answer. She cleaned his wound wordlessly, tears drying on her cheeks, her expression a scowl of concentration and anger. Legolas could feel that she was embarrassed of her tears, though he didn't know why she would be.
The moon was reflected in Legolas's eyes when he spoke again. He stared up at the stars, like far-off candles in the darkness; they always comforted him. "Men are on close terms with death. Before I saw Boromir the Tall die in Amon Hen, I had never really seen death, not in all my long centuries. Compared to you, I am a sheltered child. You have epidemics of sickness, great wars, mothers dying with child, children dying of fever and infection, old age and sickness and death. Always death, in the end. Your people die of things that would seem trivial to us, wounds we could heal without trouble. Of all people, Eowyn, with all the death you've seen, I would think that you would know the truth. Death is unnatural as the orcs and goblins. There's nothing natural about it. It is a dark thing of sorrow, and nothing good ever came of it."
He was silent and wouldn't speak of the subject again. The little sack of bread and such she had brought for him sat unnoticed at his feet. When Eowyn finished tending his wound, she put a hand on his shoulder, opened her mouth to say something more to him, then closed it. On impulse, she reached up and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek, then walked back to Helm's Deep, and let him be.
After she had been gone for almost an hour, and the moon was setting, Legolas raised his hand to his face, letting his fingers brush over where she had kissed him, like a blind child committing something to memory. Even though he knew her words were said in anger and grief, they had still hurt him. Callused? Pitiless? Unfeeling? It hurt him that anyone would think of him so.
There was still a touch of warmth on his cheek, where she had kissed him.
He felt things. He felt.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Update: The masses have spoken, so the No Slash! people win out. Which doesn't really bother me all that much. I really like both ways equally. And it was originally written as a friendship fic, anyway, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. As with Eowyn and Legolas, well...you can jump to your own conclusions. *grin*
Shameless Plugs - However, if you are into the slashier stuff, check out "Longing for Lorien" (still mostly Aragorn/Arwen, but has some intimate Legolas/Aragorn moments in there too that can be interpreted in a variety of different ways) and if you're adamantly non-slash, check out "Mortal of Imladris", which is a slightly AU Estel story centering out on how he and Arwen met, and what caused him to leave Rivendell to become a Ranger. It's promising to turn into a melodramatic romance, but I digress. As always, reviews are appreciated, no matter how brutal!
Rohan's Grief
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
During the night, Legolas barely moved. Once, he closed his eyes and shook his head, bringing his hand up briefly to touch his forehead in a gesture of exhaustion, or deep distress. Sometime after the moon had risen, he heard quiet footsteps behind him. They were too fearless and confident to be those of any woman-most of the Rohan people were still very afraid of elves, doubtful at the least and frightened at the worst-but the footsteps were too light to be those of any man, either.
"Eowyn," he said, his eyes not leaving the plains. The moonlight shone on the grasslands like snow rippling in the wind. A great white ocean, as far as the eye could see. The mountains were black against the sky, and very far away, only a ridge on the horizon. The little rivers were like ribbons of silver inlaid into the ethereal landscape. Legolas found himself wondering how a place so wild and beautiful could be found outside of an elvish realm.
"Master Legolas....Master Gimli told me I'd find you up here." Her voice was slightly startled behind him; it was quiet, and solemn as a pallbearer's.
"You have."
"I brought you something to eat. And some things to tend that wound. Since you didn't seem inclined to come back, I came out to attend you."
"I'm not hungry. The wound is nothing." His voice was flat, but full of images, dead fields under a bleak gray November sky, wilted blossoms, sadness as taut as a silver wire, as tightly drawn as a bowstring.
"You aren't the only one who suffers, Legolas."
Legolas turned his head at this, and found himself absently dismayed to see Eowyn gazing at him with tears in her eyes, tears of grief for Aragorn and the others who died at the Gap, which were expected, and tears of pity for him, which he did not want or need.
Legolas suddenly realized something, looking at Eowyn. Her hair was undone, wisps of it sticking to the tears on her pale cheeks. He sensed the dawning, doomed love Eowyn had felt for Aragorn, and was sorry for it. Sorry that it could never be. Sorry that Aragorn had loved Arwen so much, and sorry that Arwen was fool enough to fall in love with him. His falling would cause grief to more people than he could count.
Eowyn's voice was soft when she spoke again. "What are you going to tell the one who gave him that jewel you're wearing?"
"...I do not know." Legolas, really, had never thought about it. He saw death every day, dead orcs, dead fell, dark things, dead Men whose names he did not know and did not want to know. Names were secret, full of power, and naming something gave you reason to grieve over it. He didn't know why this was different.
Your brotherhood is supposed to be different, he thought. Boromir wasn't supposed to be killed because Legolas had touched him, talked to him, smiled at him, teased him, and the same went for Aragorn. They were inside the magic circle of the Fellowship, which meant that they were beyond hurt. Or at least were supposed to be. But he had began to realize something when Gandalf fell into the abyss, Gandalf, who had always seemed so ageless to him. He had truly realized when poor Boromir died hard, bleeding and coughing his life out onto fallen leaves off the banks of Amon Hen, Aragorn weeping unashamed over him, kissing the Gondorian's cold, pale brow, that what was supposed to be and what really was were two very different things.
"Will you send word to her?"
Legolas did not answer. He did not think he would be the one to tell Arwen. He knew that she would die of grief if she knew. He knew, and he felt almost as if he was dying himself. If he was forced to it, he would keep the Evenstar and tell her that Aragorn had disappeared in battle. Damned if he knew how he was going to say such a dishonorable, dispicable, cowardly lie and look her in the face. He knew deep in his heart he couldn't. She would read his eyes like a book.
// He's *not* dead! //
"No," he answered finally. "I won't. He isn't dead."
"Legolas-"
He looked up at her silently, saying all he needed to say with a glance. Eowyn was miserable, wanting so much to help, wanting to comfort him and to be comforted by him, but he had no comfort to give. All his will was bent on Aragorn's return. He had nothing left for a jilted princess. In his mind's eye, he saw Aragorn, tangled against the warg, skidding over the side of the cliff. Then the warg had been gone. And then Aragorn had been gone. Why hadn't he seen it? Why hadn't he seen that his dearest comrade was in peril?
"He would not have wanted you to suffer, Legolas."
Legolas looked back at her, shaking his head a little. "If he's dead, as you say, then what he wanted or did not want doesn't matter anymore, does it?" He sighed silently, turning back to gaze over the plains. "Don't you understand, Princess? If Aragorn, son of Arathorn, is dead, then hope is dead. And nothing remains to save your people but hope. If he does not return, none of us will live to see the new moon. So I must wait and watch."
Eowyn was silent. She stood beside him, tears showed on her face in silver moonlit tracks. She stood beside him, uncomforted.
After a few minutes, she spoke again, her eyes never leaving the bottomlands. "You were close to him?"
"...I watched him grow up. I taught him what he knows." He stood still again, and Eowyn was unnerved by that utter stillness; it was like death. "And I will stand here," he said calmly, "until Aragorn returns."
Eowyn was crying harder now, bringing a hand up to cover her face. Legolas was sorry for it, and looked over at her, observing her grief with a detachment that almost resembled cruelty. His own grief was too heavy to bear, without adding hers on top of it. She didn't just grieve for Aragorn; she cried for all of her people. Somewhere in his heart, Legolas knew he was not strong enough to shoulder such sorrow, his and hers. His heart would break with it.
Legolas did not try to comfort her. He only let her lean on him, let her cling to him desperately, as if he was the last harbor in a terrible storm, and reached forward tentatively to brush the hair back from her face.
"My lady," he said, trying finally to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture suddenly, pulling away from him as if he had grown hot to the touch. She had no intention of listening to him. Her grief had given over to fury, and she was blazing with it.
"Never mind, master elf," she said, her voice bitter with grief. Legolas could almost taste it, like tears. "You have no idea what I'm talking about. You have always been immortal, and he never was. You think just because he grew up with you, just because he belonged to you Elves, that death could never touch him. Well, you were wrong!"
Legolas recoiled as if he had been slapped. And realized that there was a sting of truth to her words. It was true; Aragorn had been raised among the Elves. He had been Hope to them for so long, that Legolas assumed he could never be hurt. He was a star that could never burn out.
She was not finished. She advanced on him like a storm, shoving him from the position he had stood at for many long hours. Dimly, Legolas understood that such daring wrath was much easier for her to express than anguish. She pounded on his chest, weeping and not knowing why. Her hands beat on his chest like the wings of little birds, almost unfelt, even though she put all her strength behind them. "Why don't you cry!? Why don't you cry for him, you callused thing! Why don't you sing your silly sad songs for all of them?! Why do you just stand there, like some pitiless breathing statue!?"
Legolas let her strike him, not moving, only looking at her, barely feeling the blows. After a few seconds, he grabbed her wrists gently, being careful not to hurt her, and let her struggle, crying and cursing him, for a few moments more, before he let her go. Eowyn turned away from him, sobbing harshly.
After awhile, her sobs quieted. She leaned down and pick up a rag she had brought, soaked with some sort of seeped herbal water that was supposed to help his wound heal. She turned back towards him, dabbed at his arm fiercely, causing him to wince. "Death is natural, Legolas. It happens to everyone," she added, her voice more quiet, hitched with the aftermath of her sobs, but her eyes were still furious, defying Legolas's calm refusal to accept the inevitable.
"Stop it," Legolas replied, looking back over at the plains, ignoring her attempts to nurse him. "You're not making any sense, and only upsetting yourself."
Eowyn didn't answer. She cleaned his wound wordlessly, tears drying on her cheeks, her expression a scowl of concentration and anger. Legolas could feel that she was embarrassed of her tears, though he didn't know why she would be.
The moon was reflected in Legolas's eyes when he spoke again. He stared up at the stars, like far-off candles in the darkness; they always comforted him. "Men are on close terms with death. Before I saw Boromir the Tall die in Amon Hen, I had never really seen death, not in all my long centuries. Compared to you, I am a sheltered child. You have epidemics of sickness, great wars, mothers dying with child, children dying of fever and infection, old age and sickness and death. Always death, in the end. Your people die of things that would seem trivial to us, wounds we could heal without trouble. Of all people, Eowyn, with all the death you've seen, I would think that you would know the truth. Death is unnatural as the orcs and goblins. There's nothing natural about it. It is a dark thing of sorrow, and nothing good ever came of it."
He was silent and wouldn't speak of the subject again. The little sack of bread and such she had brought for him sat unnoticed at his feet. When Eowyn finished tending his wound, she put a hand on his shoulder, opened her mouth to say something more to him, then closed it. On impulse, she reached up and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek, then walked back to Helm's Deep, and let him be.
After she had been gone for almost an hour, and the moon was setting, Legolas raised his hand to his face, letting his fingers brush over where she had kissed him, like a blind child committing something to memory. Even though he knew her words were said in anger and grief, they had still hurt him. Callused? Pitiless? Unfeeling? It hurt him that anyone would think of him so.
There was still a touch of warmth on his cheek, where she had kissed him.
He felt things. He felt.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~