Title: Maethor Ada
Chapter 7: Interlude
Legolas gingerly touched his wrist, the small scar still there from when he had first gone back with Aragorn to Mirkwood. The physical wounds had healed, but the emotional wounds had left scars no one besides Aragorn would ever see. Strangely enough, Legolas still kept a little part of his heart locked away where no one, not even Aragorn, dared to tread. It was one of the more cruel, more vile things that had happened to him before he had been found by Aragorn. He heard the resonating slap of a sword hitting soft, pale skin. He remembered the pain and hurt he had been dealt with the flat of a sword, bruising and almost cutting his back on more than one occasion. Then later on, he had been locked in his room, and he wasn't allowed to go out of there until he had "learned his lesson". Legolas knew if Aragorn knew about that he would have killed his father.
The cruelness of the punishment was not the worst. After he had been beaten so much that he could barely stand without once or twice moaning that he was terribly injured, he was tormented even worse by a slave master, who would grip handfuls of his thin blonde hair before grabbing his shoulder and digging his fingernails into Legolas' skin while saying, "Come along, little prince." More than once he had broken the skin on Legolas' shoulder. Legolas shuddered, not because it was cold outside, it was actually very warm, but because the thought brought chills down his spine. But that was of the past. Oddly enough, he could not shake the thought. He let his mind wander to Aragorn, and a thought of the old image, the ranger from the north flashed through his mind. He shrugged and thought back to when he had seen Aragorn a second time...
