A/N: Sorry for the brief delay; we're painting my living room a brighter color (ugh) and then my dad got pissed at me for some reason and banned me from the computer for a while. But I'm back:oD And here's the second chapter! btw, thank you SO much for the reviews, I'm glad you like it! I know things like this have been done before, but I wanted my own shot at it, and this is what's coming out! Till next time!

----------------

Disclaimer: Alas! Cruel world, thy grief is great. Thou hast no ownership o'er the characters of "Thee Lord o' thy Rings". Thoust shall ne'er taste the satisfaction of owning thee, Legolas o' Mirkwood. Alas. (haha, I luv Shakespere)

----------------

ch.2

After I helped clean his wound, I began showing him around my home, explaining to him the different electrical appliances and unfamiliar objects we came across. He had been curious about a few items, and when I cleared away his confusion on them, he moved on to some others. It took nearly the whole day, not that I'm complaining. Legolas is friendly and sweet to be around, and after a while he began to relax in my presence, which made it a lot easier for me as well.

And I'm not saying I have the biggest house in the world either, but I know I have a LOT of crap lying around, and Legolas seemed to want to know positively everything about everything, so I made sure to tell him everything. He was like an inquisitive child, and that was endearing, in an odd way in itself.

The guy didn't know what plastic was. Imagine.

Really, it was a welcomed distraction that turned us away from talking about how he had somehow appeared here. We really had no ideas on how he could have been transported to my world, so we kept our minds off of it.

It was a bit rough trying to explain it to him in a way that he would understand. I'm guessing our worlds were hundreds of years apart. He missed important inventions and discoveries, and it didn't help that he had not been born growing up with these types of things. When you were a child, the things were just there, and you really didn't care how they worked or how they came to be. Take TV, for example. Do you really ponder how the images are able to appear behind the screen when you're watching Barney bounce around his little schoolyard?

For Legolas, it was staggering to see what appeared to be living beings moving and interacting with one another beyond a slab of glass. He fell to his knees in front of the TV and stared at the flashing pictures, a thoughtful/immensely confused look on his face, his eyes following every movement of Jesse from the sitcom Full House. He even reached out to tentatively touch the surface of the screen as the children of the family darted past, the youngest of them murmuring some smart-ass comment that no four-year-old could ever conjure.

"How is this possible?" Legolas whispered, almost to himself. He seemed to have forgotten my presence behind him. "Is it some sort of powerful sorcery…?"

"There is no sorcery here," I piped up from behind, pressing the power button to switch off the TV. He seemed to snap out of a trance; he was on his feet before I even saw him move.

"How, then?" he asked, his brow still furrowed with deep confusion. "If not sorcery, then…" He made an exasperated move at the now blackened TV screen. The gesture was quite comical and I found myself smiling kindly.

"Brilliant minds," I said, tapping my temple, "paired with complicated technology. Everything here isn't made from magic, it's made from almost a billion people starting out with an idea and striving to make it come alive."

"Is there purpose to these ideas?" Legolas asked. "Is that device used for anything important?" He pointed at the remote in my hand. I shook my head while setting the rectangle of plastic down on the coffee table.

"No," I replied laconically.

"Then why create it?" Poor thing, you could see in his eyes that he was struggling with these concepts, trying to understand, trying to grasp them.

"Some inventions are made to make our lives easier," I said slowly. I pointed at the remote resting silently on the table. "For instance, that remote was created long after the TV for one purpose: to make our lives easier. There are buttons on a television that we can press, but someone, somewhere, got tired of getting up to switch the settings, so they made a remote to allow them relaxation. Now people don't have to get up to press the buttons; they're all right here, in our hands."

Legolas stared at the remote, a thoughtful expression still on his face. Holy cow, with that head wound and immense thinking he was doing, I was surprised he didn't get a killer headache.

"Then…if the remote was made to change the pictures on the TV…" Legolas murmured, plotting it all out in his mind, one step at a time, "…and to make lives easier…then what was the TV created for?"

"Sheer enjoyment," I responded with a small smile. "Life would be extremely dull without it." Legolas cocked his head, like a naïve puppy. He obviously had no idea how cute he looked when he did that.

"You can travel," he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "See new places." I shook my head.

"That costs money," I said, "money that you need to earn, and I don't have a job."

"You need money to travel?" he asked, his eyes widening in disbelief. "You cannot simply walk through your door and begin walking?" I laughed softly, shaking me head again.

"You can," I said, "but we've created new ways of travel that are faster than walking. Cars, planes…" His brow furrowed again.

"Do you not have horses?" he asked innocently. I sighed; not an impatient one, far from it. It was more of a you-poor-naïve-being sigh than it was a can-we-not-move-on sigh.

"Our systems are even faster than horses," I explained. "The people that do have horses can use them for three things: they can train them to do hurtles for competitions, they can train them to run extremely fast to participate in races, or they can simply have horses to ride for fun." I counted the list off on my fingers. "If they do more with the beasts I wouldn't know. But no one really uses them for travel anymore."

Legolas' face was the very definition of confusion and traces of a lost concept. He passed his hand over his golden hair restlessly, his eyes on the floor. "Well…what are your systems of traveling?" he asked finally. "What are cars, planes?" I let my breath out in a puff. Oh boy. This was going to take some time.

"Come with me," I said, and he followed me into the kitchen. There I pulled out some magazines and flipped to a car ad. I laid it out on the counter and began explaining what a car was. Have you ever had a teacher that's given you an assignment, saying, "Explain it thoroughly enough so that even someone who's never heard of it before would understand"? Now I remember why it was so hard to do. No one had ever really met another person who didn't understand what a car or plane was, or even electricity.

It must have been overwhelming for Legolas, by the look on his face.

It took me some time and a lot of patience, but I eventually passed the ideas of cars and planes to Legolas, who finally declared that he understood. I then resisted the urge to groan when he pointed to the kitchen sink. Time to explain plumbing to this boy.

I exited the kitchen, Legolas a pace behind me, and trudged down the hallway to the bathroom. That elf walks as silently as a ghost; I hadn't realized that he'd fallen behind until I'd reached the door of the bathroom. I glanced back to see him gone, then saw his shadow entering another room a few doors down.

Uh oh.

Fran's room.

I bounded down the hall and skidded to a stop by her door. With Fran's obsession for Lord of the Rings and other whatnot, she obviously had numerous posters decorating her walls. And it was only practical to have your favorite character's face plastered all over the room. Legolas' sharp eyes had captured the sight as he walked past the door. Shit.

He was standing in the center of the room, his hands hanging limply at his sides, his shoulders slightly slumped in what was either amazement, disbelief, or complete shock. I couldn't see his face, so I couldn't tell. I stayed silent, not sure of what I could say. Finally I just sighed.

"Legolas," I said softly. "I…I know this is…a shock—"

"A shock?"

He had so far used a soft and gentle voice around me, so I was immensely startled when the words ripped abruptly from his throat. He whirled around, and I could see not only anger in his eyes…but fear. And I didn't blame him.

"What am I supposed to make of this?" he asked me, sweeping his arm out, an overall gesture that included the posters imprinted with his face and name. "What am I supposed to do when I see—" He gulped, cutting off the rest of his sentence as he turned to look at one of his posters. He reached out with a trembling hand and touched the tips of his fingers gingerly to the paper, tracing his image's outline.

"What am I supposed to think when I see my picture here, along with my name, decorating a wall?" he whispered, and his voice shook with nearly every syllable. "How am I to cope?" He turned back to me, and gone was confusion, the anger had vanished. What I saw now was simple, single fear written all over his face. "How am I supposed to deal with all of this?" he asked me, and I could have sworn I saw raw desperation for consolation etched in the sapphire depths of his eyes. "All of this…confusion, all of these new things. How am I going to adapt to a world so blindingly different from my own?"

Had he been hiding this nameless fear from me all this time? Through the things I was explaining, I'd never thought that he could be this frightened, this intimidated by my world. But then I thought, of course he's frightened, you dolt! How would you react in a situation like this?

Legolas was staring at the posters again, his breathing a bit ragged. I don't think he could bring himself to tear his eyes away from something that had simply sent him over the edge, broke his reserve. He was shaking so badly I could see it from where I was standing at the door. He seemed so different from the noble, brave pictures on the wall, and I felt sorry for him.

When he looked back at me, he must have seen the pity in my eyes, for then his face hardened. "I don't need your sympathy," he whispered stubbornly, but his voice was still quavering. I shook my head slowly, then swiftly strode into the room the enveloped him in my arms. His last words had undone me. Still, in all of this fear in confusion he was experiencing, he tried to be brave, and I couldn't help but admire him for it. I normally gave up quickly, usually never having enough strength to keep fighting.

Legolas stiffened when I wrapped him in my embrace, but he didn't push me away, as I had expected. He stayed stiff and still for a moment, but then he relaxed and allowed me to comfort him. He rested his forehead against my shoulder.

"I'm not sure I can do this," he murmured softly, his voice slightly muffled.

"Do what?" I asked, just as quietly.

"Adapt to this world," he replied, lifting his head slightly to glance at the posters, but then hiding his face against my shoulder again, as if trying to hide from his own image. "Adjust to these strange new things. I don't know if I can."

"I'll help you," I said with conviction I didn't know I had, "I can help you get used to all of this." Legolas lifted his head again to look at me, the sapphire eyes hopeful.

"You will?" he asked softly, sounding like a puppy that had just heard someone declare that they were being taken home.

"Yes," I replied, my voice firm. "I want to help you." He smiled slightly, a small spark entering his eyes. Dammit, why did he have to be so handsome?

"Hannon le," he said simply. Before I could ask what that meant, I heard the front door bang loudly, shaking the whole house. Legolas flinched violently in my arms, his head snapping towards the bedroom door in alarm. Just then a voice drifted down the hall.

"Kyla? You here? Yo, Kyla!"

Shit, could Fran have chosen a more inconvenient time to come home from work?

------------------

So, how'd ya like it? Thy shalt wait for thee's reviews! Thanx.