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The Passing of Years

Time has a way of running in fits and starts, Legolas thought, as news of a messenger for Faramir's folk was called into the settlement on the heavy summer breeze. It was, he considered, like that span of weeks between winter and spring in his erstwhile home, when branches would unfreeze just enough for water to corkscrew from those overwintered tendrils of wild grape and thick ivy wound about the trees like knitwear. For a day, then, a hint of green with the drip-drip-pattering of that suggestion of summer, but then—the next—a snap of cold like a whip cracked over the eaves, leaving all that once stirred frozen and stiff—momentarily preserved, and sometimes cowed—in its wake.

Time was like that.

Time with mortals was like that even more, though he had never had to consider it until this chapter of his life. Now, it caught him off guard with its fits and starts: from traversing the surface of smooth water (cutting through sunlight on a lake at dawn); to fighting for control in the rapids (hardly able to keep one's head above the froth); to standing stock still (sunk in and anchored deep) in a moment never-ending, utterly aware of the details of a place and a person, and the enormity of a feeling, because the number of times it would happen—happen just like this—could be counted on one hand, instead of eternally innumerable: instead of centuries and millenia of possibilities scattered across an endless, shifting sky.

It reached deep inside his chest, some days, and shook him.

It reached deep inside his chest today and shook him, and it left him swaying like a sapling in a storm, quivering, poorly rooted, and desperate for the sun to return and offer him direction.

Faramir's messenger—who Legolas immediately recognized as young Farasben, son of Mablung (second to Faramir himself), born his first year in the South—burst into the clearing on his horse in the late evening light, gesturing with a roll of parchment in his hand. He leapt from his horse with a flourish and announced with a grin as Legolas stirred:

"Hail, Lord Legolas! Prince Faramir and Lady Eowyn of Emyn Arnen announce the birth of their second son, Folcwine. They request the Lord Legolas' presence the morn after next to celebrate and, in the esteemed lord's absence, the Lord Ithildim's."

He paused to hand Legolas the physical message and then inclined his head, tilted it to the side to indicate a shift in roles. Legolas smiled and watched the wind play at the ranger's tidy braids.

"And Elboron sends a message to his tutor, which I cannot properly communicate because my accent would render it incomprehensible."

Legolas smiled without speaking and the world shrunk to a point around Farasben as he focused on him and this moment in time. He felt Ithildim approaching behind him.

"He misses his dialect lessons and he cannot wait to see you. He hopes you will still love him and that Folcwine will not overly occupy your time."

Legolas burst into laughter and ushered Farasben forward, opening his arm wide to direct him into the Common Hall and those still lingering over dinner. Ithildim passed him off to Alfirinion and looked at Legolas oddly as he unrolled the message. He took it from Legolas gently and smiled, dropped a hand onto his shoulder thoughtfully and sighed.

"It seems like—"

"Less than a season? Less than a moon?"

"And yet more than our lifetimes combined," Ithildim finished. "Since Elboron was come, yes."

They turned to look at one another for a long minute before speaking again, and Legolas' attention caught for a moment on a sparrow overhead until Ithildim jerked him away.

"Folcwine," he said, shaking his head. "What a name."

"Friend of the folk, I think, if I have absorbed any of Eowyn's forceful lessons at all."

Ithildim smiled and tugged him back toward the cottage, though Legolas routed them slightly to peer into the open hall and assure Farasben was being seen to.

"Her ancestor, I imagine," Legolas continued vaguely as he withdrew his head, and Ithildim raised his eyebrows. "And Faramir does have quite well-developed fellow-feeling. Perhaps the name shall suit him."

"I am rather fond of fellow feeling, too," Ithildim said of a sudden, and he tugged at Legolas' arm again and maneuvered him back onto the path toward their cottage. "It will be a long day tomorrow with Farasben and another long one after that journeying, and then several days in residence in Emyn Arnen… And you were away for so long with Gimli," Ithildim finished with feeling, "and I have missed you."

Legolas smiled but rolled his eyes. He tried his best to ignore the way Ithildim's eyes reflected bright as mica in the lamps along the path; the way he reached out to tuck unruly hair behind an ear (sword-calluses catching at the curve of his lobe); the way he leaned in as he rolled up the tightly knit reed curtain that fit in the doorway, how he brushed against him intentionally as he moved past…

He tried, but it did not work.

Time slowed to a stutter as they fell into bed, one grain of sand for each set of a hundred heartbeats. It was times like these that the raucous rapids of unpredictable mortal time would fall away; it was times like these that the scent of the Sea was undercut with the musk of the forest, with the kiss of smooth skin instead of the scrape of salt and glass. It was times like these that distance from the pain that snaked, sometimes, into his stomach and grabbed him round the heart could be maintained, when everything else would fall away but this one thing, this one person, this one moment, forever.

But it would—still—end, and the world would come back louder than ever, crashing in like waves over the storm levies he had seen built at Dol Amroth. As he lay with an arm thrown across Ithildim's waist, the walls of the world would descend again. The seed of an ache lit hot and deep like fire in his heart.

That seemed like the only thing that never changed: the yearning, and the neverending fight. Everything else was a season, a minute, a blink, and then a thousand lifetimes compressed into the space of mortal span.

Ithildim slept beside him and Legolas closed his eyes and listened to the stirring of the trees, for hours. He listened to the breeze until it stopped sounding like waves, until the swooping call of the dove at dawn sounded like a herald of day and not a cold cry, not an augury of a gift he refused to accept but, nonetheless, could never quite ignore.

The sun rose and the bed was spattered with the light of a thousand shadows as the thick oak leaves quivered in the wind. He let himself get lost in them for just a moment before rising and dressing and throwing himself into the day, as if he had nothing—nothing—to lose.

.o.

He had first sat in this private courtyard after an awkward meeting at the beginning of the century, after he had convinced the then-young lord his "magic" had been without malicious intent, in front of all those counselors, beneath that ailing, wintered arbour. They had shared a long afternoon in this courtyard later, over tea, and then wine in the evening a few days after that, until it was a weekly occurrence any time Legolas was in the city. Legolas was there the night he received the news of his mother's death; he heard the young man's weekly rumination on matters of marriage; he stood by as he bound himself to that woman over which he had pined, received news of the couple's first child over tea and freshly cut flowers, and blessed the child herself when she came screaming into that raucous river of time some months later.

Today, he stood in this courtyard with Gimli at his side and shifted subtly from foot to foot, concentrating hard to keep his thoughts firm and anchored and on the ground, for the sea came on the breeze like the scent of forest on his sheets, and Gimli trod continually on his foot as the afternoon progressed.

There were a handful of people here that looked like the man, that young lord who had offered him his friendship free of charge and without expectation. A group of family that stood out above all others because of the likeness: he could link them like a chain across time in that courtyard before him, and his heart stuttered and he swallowed hard.

His brow creased as grandchild helped mother—who was, also, daughter—who helped the young lord's (old lord now, old and dead) wife. So many in so short a time, and what did he have to show for it but a handful of memories like pearls, too precious to lose, too difficult to carry, until he was clutching and grabbing for the pieces of him that fell through his fingers anytime he tried to step away?

Gimli took him at the elbow and jerked his head to the side, and Legolas made their polite excuses before ducking away. They walked down the street and turned up a quiet alley before Gimli cleared his throat and spoke:

"You said to me once, in nearly this very place, how men do not fail of their seed."

Legolas raised an eyebrow but nodded.

"That they 'will lie in the dust and rot, to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for.'"

"I said that the deeds of Men will outlast us, yes."

Gimli shrugged. "I think you are right. And I think this is a beautiful world with endlessly marvelous things, and yet—"

Legolas chewed the inside of his lip and picked up his pace, and Gimli hurried as quickly as he could beside him, though he slowed slightly on the hill.

"I am all right finally, you see," the dwarf said, as they reached the corridor outside their rooms and Legolas opened the door for them, slipped inside, "with ending up as Might-Have-Beens."

Legolas did not speak.

"The world is long," Gimli said with a sigh, and he sat heavily in a chair by the fire and began to pull off his shoes. "And you and I will outlive it."

Legolas sat cross-legged on the bed and began to work the braids from his curls, absentminded but intent as Gimli concluded from his seat:

"At least for a time."

Legolas ran a hand through his hair and pinned it back from his face. He crossed to the door and called out for something warm for Gimli—anything—and closed them in to wait.

The wood cracked in the fire. Legolas tugged at his sleeves and shifted his weight from ball to heel and back, and he watched as Gimli drifted into sleep.

.o.

For the first time in years, Legolas found himself scraping the inside of his mind for words that would not come. Gimli laid a hand on his knee understandingly and then stood and walked from the room, releasing Legolas from a self-imposed determination to not exclude the dwarf from conversation when among Sindarin-speaking acquaintances. As the door to the hall hissed shut, Legolas turned to stare at Elladan and stuttered fiercely:

"You would leave her now? With only a beautiful but patchwork colony, and this sad excuse for a wandering leader—" he gestured self-deprecatingly— "as the only elves within leagues of her, in this stone…city of Minas Tirith?"

Elrohir ran a hand through his hair where he stood at the bar. He tapped the lip of an empty wine glass with nervous fingers, for he had preemptively opened the bottle before asking Legolas to meet them...

"The decision is made, Legolas. This is not an opportunity for debate, but a discussion of how, and of when."

Legolas scoffed. "You could wait to leave with me. I cannot stay here forever without my soul being flayed and strewn by the wind. You could wait a few more years."

"We cannot," Elladan sad firmly, and he looked pointedly toward Elrohir, and Legolas' cheeks burned with sudden reprimand after a moment of silence.

"Apologies, I had not realized—"

Elrohir waved his hand and picked up the wine he had poured as Elladan spoke. He dragged Legolas toward a chair and placed it pointedly in his hand.

"You think you will wait to sail," Elladan said then. "And that is what concerns me."

Legolas sipped his wine and did not answer, and he watched the breeze catch at the curtains, casting translucent shadows on the far wall, but Elladan pushed forward:

"Legolas, who will take you? How will you get over sea? Be reasonable."

But he drank his wine and did not reply.

"Do you intend to build and guide your own ship? Even Ithildim leaves now! Join us with our grandfather, and Cirdan. Do not do this to yourself. You have done your duty to Aragorn; you have been a better friend to our sister than even we were able to be. Give yourself this one gift. Save yourself this one pain. Do not risk an eternity of wandering like a sprite or spirit in the woods, doomed to watch the passage of time with no way to affect it until you are, simply, gone."

Legolas laughed bitterly at then, and even Elladan cracked an ironic smile as Elrohir stirred to life beside them.

"Though, I suppose," he offered, "that may not feel so different to you than now."

Legolas tilted his head in acknowledgement and then watched the two for a moment before tapping his wineglass as if in thought.

"I will find a way into the West if I have to sprout wings myself to journey there," he finally said with heavy determination. "You may go now, but I have years yet. It is the tug of Ithildim in my heart that will guide me o'er Sea when I am ready, but for now there is your sister, and Aragorn, and—" he swallowed and looked up at the pair. "And the dwarf. I have a life here yet to live, and then I shall bring the memories of those lives to you, and your family."

Elladan dropped a hand heavy onto Legolas' shoulder and squeezed.

"I will hold you to that, Legolas."

He nodded and put down the empty glass Elrohir had earlier pushed into his hand.

"Take care," Elrohir added as he and his brother leaned against the door to leave.

Legolas nodded seriously. He flicked away the darkness that settled on his heart like an unwelcome cloak and, in the next moment, a grin split his face.

"I expect I will see you at dinner, though, so do not be so eager to fare me well!"

They pushed the door open, and Elladan laughed as Elrohir rolled his eyes.

"Irrepressibly cheerful even—" one of them murmured as they left the room, but Gimli hurried back in past them with the speed of a dwarf who had aged just enough to show it in his steps.

"—even when he ought not be, yes," Gimli finished succinctly with a punctuating huff, and he shut the door firm behind them and turned. "Why do you not leave, too?" he demanded cuttingly. "What is wrong with you?"

"I have asked myself that question, elvellon, since I opened my heart to you in Lorien some seventy years past."

Gimli stared and then patted his shoulder and laughed. "Go, get dressed, Legolas. You look like you have crawled out of a fox-den after winter. It is appalling."

And so, with a last smile over his shoulder, Legolas went.

.o.

After that, their friends passed one after another, and Legolas shattered.

He disappeared into the wilds of Ithilien for a time, and he returned a month later battered and bruised but relatively whole. Gimli waited for him in their suite in Minas Tirith, where he patched him back together like he always had: health and language, heart and soul-piece by piece, and grain by grain, reconstructed within the corporeal image of this Legolas in Arda, Legolas in Middle-earth, Legolas in the Fourth Age in this moment and in time, captured between walls, between souls, between grass and sky, trunk and canopy, elf and dwarf and man and halfling and on and all and gone.

But he spent hours this time and days unnumbered—time lost and uncountable—sequestered away with Arwen, in secret conference-a language all their own-and they would let no one disturb them. Not husband, not heart-brother, not child or sponsor-son. Just the two of them alone in the room and the gardens. When anyone asked why, Aragorn would hush them and shoo them away; pull the gate to the garden firmly; lock the door to their sanctuary tighter, and he would answer them this:

"For elves—as we age—every day, for them, is a small funeral."

And there were no more questions after that.