The rain ceased to fall as the sun got ready to sink below the horizon, and the night came cool and damp.  During the night vigil rotation, Gimli sat by his best friend's side.  Legolas still was racked with fever and Gimli noticed that most of the wounds he'd sustained during his captivity and torment had remained, for the most part, unchanged and unhealed, his body being too occupied with the poison to do much of anything else. 

"Well now, Legolas," he began after the silence finally got to him, "I sure hope Gandalf is right and your body can get all of the poison out.  I'm not letting you go without a fight, you hear me laddie?  You never gave up on me, even in fair Lorien when I was denied entry.  You know, I'll never quite figure out why you did what you did and vouch for me.  Ah well, a little mystery never hurt a friendship before."  He sighed.  "It's strange, the silence.  I guess I'm gotten used to hearing your voice, as quiet as you can get sometimes.  Don't leave us, alright?"

He fell silent again, into his own thoughts, and, absent-mindedly, he began to sing an elvish song.  It was that which Legolas had sung to himself while he'd been shackled and beaten in the dwarven stronghold, though there was no way that Gimli could have known that.  True, the dwarf knew only a small segment of the song and his elvish was clumsy and broken, but he made do and certainly any elf would have recognized it.

And one did, for Thranduil had been holding vigil over Legolas as well.  But as he sat in a darkened corner of the room, Gimli had overlooked him and assumed that the elven king had gone elsewhere before he'd had a chance to come onto his watch.

"That song," Thranduil said, startling Gimli, "it's always been one of Legolas' favorites."

"I know," Gimli replied softly.  "He often sang it as we traveled.  I used to hear him singing to himself at night while he was on watch."

Thranduil nodded to himself.  "But how…how did you learn it?  Surely not just by hearing it a few times."

"You are right; I didn't just pick it up.  Legolas taught me, though I dare say my pronunciation needs work.  But it was all he could do to teach me what he has!" He laughed a little.  "Mostly he taught me as we worked on the restoration of Gondor, what we've started to do in any case."

"I must say, Master Gimli, when I received letters from my son and he mentioned a friend named Gimli, I never expected you to be a dwarf."

"Oh?"

"And when I saw for the first time what you were, I was a bit taken aback."

Gimli nodded.  "It's because of the strife between our kinds, isn't it?"

"In part, yes.  But it reaches deeper than that.  You see, my father was killed by a dwarf."

Gimli paled, horror stricken.  "What?"

"He was not of your lineage, for I have spoken with Gandalf and traced you back.  It was another.  This was after the Dark Days, and my people still held strained relations with the dwarves.  My father, he got into an argument with one of the dwarves…a Tenedow by name.  This Tenedow, he was drunk, and soon the argument escalated into an all out fight."

"But surely an elf could out match him in speed and agility?  Legolas and I sometimes spar and he usually gets the better of me."

"Ah, this is true, but my father was already wounded.  Mirkwood had been attacked by evil creatures, not of Sauron, but of some older evil, and he had been wounded by one while on a hunt to slay them all.  So he was already weakened before the fight began.  Tenedow knew this and used it to his advantage.  I witnessed the whole thing.  I saw that axe hit him, I saw the blood rush forth.  But before he died, my father raised his own dagger and smote down the dwarf as he lifted his axe to deliver a second blow.  I rushed to my father's aid, but I was too late.  He lost too much blood and died right there as I held his head in my lap.  I was 60 years old at the time, and was utterly alone."

"I can understand then why you must have hated seeing your son being friend's with a dwarf, and why Legolas was so hostile towards me in the beginning."

"Yes, it did quite shock me to see that one of his best friends is a dwarf.  For every since he heard what happened to his grandfather, he carried with him as deep a hatred of dwarves as I."

"But that does not explain why he would have stuck up for me in Lothlorien or what sort of change made him decide to befriend me."

"To that, I do not know the answers, but I know my son.  There must have been something that he saw – a goodness in your soul-that made him change his thoughts.  And for that, I am grateful, for I have heard the stories of your friendship, both through his letters and from Aragorn.  And as much as I hated to admit it at first, you are a good friend to him, Gimli son of Gloin and I am glad that he has such a friend."

"And I am lucky to have him as a friend.  Your son is a good person.  I trust him with my life.  And now…now I'm afraid for him."

"As am I."