Three days passed before Thranduil met with the twins again to talk. He visited them in their room - they could barely gather the energy to leave it any more and the healer's visits were nothing more than formality. There was nothing more they could do.
When the King entered the young elves' sanctuary one pair of grey eyes rose to meet his own, and he stepped into the room at their acknowledgement. He moved across the room to sit in the window seat, pushing the dark curtains aside to make room for his own form and letting light filter around him. The thin beams illuminated dust trails through the room and the Elven-King watched them with quiet curiosity.
"He does little but sleep, while I can barely shut my eyes in peace." The waking twin spoke. It was Elrohir, Thranduil realised he knew, while before he had made no attempt to discern between the two. It gave him a strange sense of achievement - as though he had finally done something to make it up to his son.
"We all deal with these experiences differently, it is the way of people that we are individual." Elrohir looked at Thranduil for a moment, his expression unreadable.
"We are one fëa… we are not individual." He stated, seemingly curious that Thranduil did not already know it.
"Then you are showing the two facets of the same malady. It is naught to be scared of."
"Perhaps." There was a soft silence for several minutes, and Thranduil had returned to his study of the beams of dust as Elladan began to stir. Blinking into drowsy wakefulness he laid a soft kiss on his brother's forehead and turned to Thranduil as if he had always known he was there.
"My Lord." He spoke in a voice of sadness, for his sleep had not lifted his melancholy.
"My Son." Thranduil replied softly.
"What would you have of us, my lord?" Elladan asked when nothing further was said.
"A little more time to speak of things yet unspoken. Do you think you have some to spare?"
"For you, my lord, all of eternity." Elrohir spoke with sincerity.
"Do not offer what you do not have to give." Thranduil spoke, his tone strong as he met Elrohir's eyes in challenge.
"Then what time we may have, is yours." Elladan clarified. Thranduil nodded once, placated.
"I see you are weary, let me tell you a little of the family you should have been welcomed into had this been a less tragic tale."
"Aye, we would greatly like to hear of our Las' youth."
"That, I would say you know more of than I. But I will try." The King took a deep breath, and it seemed to the twins that in the halo of light through the window the robes and chains of leadership fell away from him and he was nothing but a bereaved father. His voice, as he began to speak, was tinged with sadness and loss. "The Last Alliance… I will begin here because what came before was the happiest I had ever been and still it is too bitter sweet to think of… the Last Alliance took from me my only daughter in battle, and my first son through grief - he was too young to see the losses of war - and later my wife through grief at the loss of our children. It took… my King, my father, and within the span of less than ten years all that my life had been was changed. I could not grieve myself - the wood was not strong enough to lose another sovereign and my people were near destroyed. All separations that we had imagined between Sindarin and Silvan were discarded, there were too few of us now to worry about such things. I took a Silvan Queen - a woman who I had long loved as a sister - and she and I began to encourage the rebuilding of our forest and its people. Perhaps… perhaps this was more a political match than one made for love, our forest was splintering apart with talk of abandoning the city, and only through a show of solidarity could we bring our two peoples together. Perhaps I did not give enough care to my second wife, having little time to spare around rebuilding a ravaged realm." A breath caught in Thranduil's throat and he turned for a moment to face the sun that warmed his back through the window. "The conception of our son was upon the eve of the decision that new life was in too much danger, than not even all of the training we could provide would keep our children safe in the coming storm. Many thought we had broken our own edict when Ardëa was seen to be with child. Unfortunate timing on our part." A flicker of a smile on the old elf's face, the twins sat forward on the bed, chins in hands, enraptured. "But they had long followed us, and thus, we were quickly forgiven. As the last-born, Legolas' birth was celebrated as none other, with hope and sadness. We all knew that there was a good chance that we would never see another generation of Mirkwood elves." The smile vanished. "I feared to lose him, my second son, and so I distanced myself. The life expectancy for a young elf in these lands is barely past his majority, but in distancing myself I caused a much greater harm. Ardëa began waning shortly after Legolas' birth. The darkness on the horizon left too big a shadow on her, and she could not hear her trees over it. The Silvans take such strength and joy in their trees and she could not reach them. The other Silvans said they could pinpoint the moment the wood discovered their Queen was dead. The wood hasn't spoken since.
"My son was brought up with his mother's bow in his hand and the forest in his heart. There is more Silvan in him than Sindarin, but I do not envy him that freedom… I did not envy him.
"They have the trees - own them in a way that cannot be equalled in elvendom. It is as though they live a second life as a greater entity - as one part of the Great Wood. It is as much pain as joy, for they feel if the wood loses a limb, or if the Darkness in the south chooses to clear an area. Before Linlas died… before my first son died, any one of the Silvan population would have told me what was happening in any part of my forest - they needed only touch a living bough. The trees are all connected, above ground, below ground. The forest withdrew after his death - he was strangely gifted for a Sindarin boy, or so they used to tell me. The wood took him as one of its own, and he gave as much as he took. He was too soft for war, I should have seen it…" Thranduil lapsed into silence for a moment. "The forest withdrew after his death, and it would only talk to Ardëa. Sauron's first incursion almost killed her, the forest cried out to her for help - but she was not strong enough, and we could do nothing as we were overrun. After her death… no one has heard its full song in a long time, even by elven reckoning. But still, the Silvans know its love. They move through the wood as though it were an extension of themselves. The love is not one-sided." Thranduil paused with a sigh, looking up as Elladan spoke:
"It always startled him to come across trees not mourning his mother and brother. We never understood why he found the song so surprising, growing up in a forest himself. Now it makes sense."
"I had wanted him to see true forests - Lórien, Fangorn, where speech is still free and unhindered. Much joy would he have taken from such a meeting." He replied, a smile ghosting over his features at the thought.
"It is had to forget his first speech with the trees of Rivendell. We had not realised how long the Mirkwood trees had been silenced - but now…"
"Now we wish we had taken him to those places, helped him discover them."
