Time Transcended
Rocks and Ice
Disclaimer: "If/Then" statement: If you think I own anything, then I think you are mistaken.
"Here, this is for you," Elladan said holding out his gift for her.
She thanked him as she carefully unwrapped the small package. Under the layer of silvery paper was white paper, and in that was a box. She opened it up and inside found a polished green stone nestled in tissue paper. She stared curiously at it as she picked it up and learned it was leaf shaped. She studied the stone and impulsively held it up to the light.
"Dan!" she gasped as she looked at it. "How in the world did you do this?"
"It wasn't very hard," he grinned.
"But it glows so prettily, like the sun through leaves, and… what is that I see in it, I can't figure it out?"
"It is the light of the stars as it was when they first appeared," he explained.
"It almost looks like rain drops in the leaf," she replied, yet awestruck. "What kind of rock is this?"
"It is an elven stone. There is no modern equivalent to it now."
"What a shame," Liz said as she marveled at her stone some more.
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All night she kept the stone close to her, regarding it as the most beautiful thing she had ever been given to date. Elladan dropped her off at her house around midnight, and then went home to find Glorfindel waiting up for him.
"I had a marvelous evening Glorfindel!" Elladan declared as he walked in the door.
"I figured you would, so I sat up so you wouldn't feel it necessary to wake me up and tell me about it," Glorfindel replied.
"Liz loved the stone I gave her, and we had marvelous conversation all evening. And when I dropped her off we made a date for three nights from now," Elladan said finishing up his report.
Glorfindel smiled and nodded. Elrohir had always been the romantic, so after he came from a gloriously wonderful date with Rebecca, he would say a few words, then put the whole thing into verse and music, calmly. When Elladan had a gloriously wonderful date, he would force you to listen to him say his fill (which thankfully was always concise) with all the excitement of a formal report, then he would go into his room and document it, then force Elrohir to read it. Glorfindel had a sneaking suspicion he would be forced to be the replacement Elrohir, but learned the next day that was not so.
True to form, Elladan, having thus given his primitive outline of the evening, changed into something comfortable and documented the evening in precise detail in his journal. Five pages of elvish script later he shut his journal and flopped onto his bed. He stared at the ceiling for a while, in a meditative state, and decided it was high time to go to sleep, and did so.
The next morning he awoke and found it to be a very grey and damp day. His spirits were in rebellious contrast to the weather, and he couldn't have cared less that it was so. After breakfast he was in his room, lounging on a couch, when he suddenly had a strange feeling that something was amiss somewhere. Almost positive the problem did not lie with Rebecca and Elrohir, nor Glorfindel, his thoughts turned to Liz and there they stopped. He became inexplicably concerned with how she was right then, and thus decided to call her. His phone rang five times, then her answering machine picked up. He knew she was not in classes today, and that she would be home all day, at least, that is what she had told him last night. Impulsively he ran downstairs, got in the car, and drove over to her.
He arrived at the door of her apartment and did not like what he heard inside. He heard her crying, so he knocked.
"Who is it?" came the tearful call.
"Dan," he replied.
"Thank goodness! Come in," she called
He entered and found her sitting on the floor rubbing her ankle fiercely. Traces of tears were yet on her face, and she looked like she was in pain.
"What happened?" Elladan asked, kneeling down next to her.
"I was walking from the fridge to the sink and slipped on an ice cube and hurt my ankle," she explained.
"May I take a look at it?" he asked.
"Go for it!" she said, removing her hands and rolling up her pant leg a little.
He gently held her foot and began searching for the cause of the injury. His hands, warm as usual, felt good on her aching foot. At last he looked up at her and smiled.d
"You sprained it well enough, but there is no need for a cast. If you wish, I will help you onto the couch and shall wrap your foot for you," he offered.
"I wish! The linoleum isn't exactly comfortable," Liz joked.
Elladan stood up and then helped her to her feet. After two hops on her part she began to lose her balance, so they stopped and he carried her.
"There you go! Now, where is your first aid kit?" Elladan asked.
"In the bathroom under the sink," Liz said. He fetched it and a few minutes later her ankle was wrapped and propped up on a pillow on the coffee table.
"Do you need or want anything?" Elladan asked.
"Some water please. Crying always makes me thirsty," Liz requested.
"It always made Arwen thirsty too," he said as got into her cupboards for a glass. "When she was an elfling she would cry all the time! If she was scared, happy, anything. Eventually we all grew so tired of her incessant weeping that Father told her if she didn't stop crying Rivendell would flood. She believed him and promptly stopped."
"That was mean!" Liz said laughing.
"Mother thought so too, but she was glad Arwen stopped," Elladan said as he handed her the water.
Liz thanked him and took a sip then proclaimed, "My ankle still hurts."
"I can amend that," Elladan said heroically. "Lend me your ankle please."
She turned herself about so her ankle was resting in his lap. He slowly began to rub it and sing almost inaudibly. Slowly her ankle ceased hurting and felt fine. She thanked him, a little awestruck that he did that, and returned to her original position.
"What else can you do?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you just made my ankle stop hurting, what else can you do?" she asked again.
"When I was more practiced, I could heal numerous sicknesses and hurts, but not as many as Elro or my father. Now… I don't know. I haven't been healing much since I came here from Valinor."
"I wish I could do that. That would be really awesome if I could heal people," she said, half to herself.
"In a time of war it's more like a curse because after you've done all you can, many still die, and you are exhausted and there is no one to heal you of your hurts, so you must do it yourself. But you can't because you've just healed fifty or more people and you are spent," Elladan said, with a flickering grin on his face. He recalled those days with some happiness of victory but sorrow of the losses.
"That would be a bummer," she admitted.
He chuckled and said, "You have no idea."
"Would you consider us a dating couple?" Liz blurted out.
Elladan looked over at her, in surprise at the randomness of the question and trying to evaluate their relationship. At length he said, "Well, yes. We have gone on a few dates, and we seem to like each other rather well."
"That's what I was thinking. I just wanted to see if you were on the same page I was," she replied.
"Would you consider me your boyfriend?" Elladan asked, feeling it was his turn to be blunt and random.
"Well… I wouldn't say you are a boy, but I would call you my boyfriend," she answered.
He smiled and gave a warm grin. "My first girlfriend in… four hundred years," he said quietly.
"My first boyfriend in fourteen months," Liz said. Then what he had said sunk in and she cried, "Four hundred years! And I thought my dating life was slow!"
"Don't rub it in," Elladan mumbled.
Authors note: Okay… that was… yeah… Review please!
