i literally have no excuse other than i was half-afraid and half-dispirited someplace along the way. thankfully, that is no longer the case.
oOo
This night, Thranduil does not see him along the market. Nor the thoroughfare.
Nor does he see the woman.
The last of the merchants and fruit-bidders have locked up. And now there is nil but the fog-shrouded moonshine of some Saturday midnight and the occasional drunk.
Thranduil idles little, and goes instead to the apothecary, where the next district lies. There he has versed that Thorin has taken great care to visit at least once every dusk, purchasing along the occasional phial of medicine or cruet of lavender salve. Or—much the more often—a braided knot of tobacco, for the use of his pipe.
It is a filthy fad amongst plenty that flounder about most of all England, Thranduil supposes. But it has shown to be a terribly important thing to Thorin, and so Thranduil allows the fault to slip past.
In time, Thranduil arrives. A road's breadth away from the apothecary, shrouded in the eventide.
Thorin is there.
His fingers barely leaving their grasp of the shop's handle-latch, a sheaf of feverfew held in his other hand.
He is swathed in furs, as always. In cotton thread and leather strop. His hair is loose, caping to a length across his shoulders. On his hands, marks of grime. Coal and ember, a distant half-thought hinged in the lowness of his brow as he starts upon the sidewalk.
Thranduil moves then from the shadow of the crossing, revealing himself to the open lamplight of the streets. He strides forth with simple purpose. Until he and Thorin are on the same walkway and going towards opposite paths, just ells apart. The seconds pass, filled only by the echo of their footsteps. A glance away now, and still Thorin does not look up to see him.
Until he does.
It is a quick and easy meeting of the eyes. A nod of modest greeting, two strangers meeting for a second time amid an awning of causal circumstance.
But to Thranduil, it is a thing of millennia gone by.
He stops him.
He shouldn't (by all that he's seen and all that he's blooded), he shouldn't. But he does. And Thorin is perhaps a foot away from him, a candid courtesy in the way that he regards Thranduil's nearing when he slows in his steps to heed him.
"Pardon me. But I've just recently arrived and I've trouble with directions."
His curiosity, Thranduil sees, is all but captured in that second. And if he had Thorin's passing attention before, Thranduil now holds the whole of his interest.
"Recently?" asks Thorin, slowing to a finish. "You come from farther shores, then?"
"Quite," says Thranduil simply, though nothing in all of the earth could ever again be simple after having sown this. "I am only looking for the cinematography. I fear the urchin has perchance misled me."
"The Theatre Royal, you mean," says Thorin, more a statement than an actual query. Either way, it lessens his voice in its general means of generosity almost instantly, much as well as it darkens the all-scheme of his demeanor. "It is far-ways, friend. Half a league away, at least. Where the fops of the outskirts dally."
"Along the bridge, then?"
"Aye. Left and towards the river. You may follow it."
Now, Thorin moves to leave. But Thranduil himself remains and spins once on his heel and says:
"I hear it is a wonder of the civilized world. This wharf of England."
Thorin pauses, and chuckles. A measured roll of sound that tolls against the flagstone. But Thranduil understands, it is no well-wish.
"If you seek English culture, friend, there are alleys a plenty this side of York," he fleers. "Gander, if you wish. Good day."
"I have offended you," calls Thranduil, and he allows his gaze to fall to the floor for the fraction of a moment, amidst the slight and apologetic inclination of his head. "As it were, I shall bother you no more."
He knows, however, that Thorin has viewed this. That the simple gesture shall be more than enough to win him from his going. Because, in the blackness, Thranduil is lucid. Vernal and fair. And much like the star-let steer of kismet, his lure is vast and his vantage, never-ending.
He knows this, has been this. And now, even Thorin will learn this.
Silence first. Then Thorin hesitates and turns. Staying.
Now Thranduil's simper is the only thing that gleams.
"You have traveled much, then?"
"I have," Thranduil tells him. "I've a fondness, for all of Europe."
"I am sure." Thorin comes closer. Looking once to his left. As if considering. And says, "An introduction is due. I am Thorin."
"Thranduil."
Thorin offers him his palm. Thranduil takes it. It is warm there, though his own is hidden over in leather-glove. For this he is thankful. Now that he grasps that he is unable to pull away even after a long enough while between them.
It is the all-steel of his eyes, muses Thranduil.
Such craft left unseen. Lost purpose traced along the sharp contours of his jaw, regality there, for he is meant more for the reign of one nameless kingdom than for the doleful mundane of all this. He is for the forming of stone, for the doings of alloy or mold. Jewels in his hands, gilt rings that must only glimmer like art on the arcs of his fingers.
A thing of yore. Thorin. Ancient in essence and once ago told. These shapes of him.
Thranduil finds he cannot move. Nor does he want to. Finds that he has already dared another step towards him, closer—
"Thorin, who is this man?"
The spell drifts, much into dust. Thorin takes back his hand and Thranduil is left with his own brusquely discarded, jilted of touch.
"A traveller," he hears Thorin say, allowing the woman in turn to hook herself against him. "In need of directions—"
Now there is glass pressed upon Thranduil's visage. Cracked. The creak of it, wrenching. The half-knell of nihility, the frame of them in crimson, but the world, it is red already.
"We must leave now, love," she tells Thorin importantly. "Lest Kili shed another tear before his bedtime. You know this."
Slow, Thranduil enables his hand to fall back to his side. The woman's eyes shift towards him, down and up. Several times. Green. And tremendously lashed, but they linger only for a hair's breadth of minimal lapse before simply looking back at Thorin, as if she'd only just seen absolutely nothing there at all.
She goads Thorin on going—her ribboned ropes of webbing hair pouring off him—as she pecks him gently on the cheek and leans her head against the broad expanse of his chest, and he, he bolsters her there, upholds her like a gift.
She pulls his sleeve to leave. And Thorin, he does not resist her whim. He goes with her.
Though, he does turn once more towards Thranduil (amid the obnoxious belling of her laughter) and says:
"Good day."
Thranduil is left standing.
Still, among the muddied snow melting on the pavement underneath his boots.
On his tongue, an open cut. The tar of clot. Like poison.
oOo
A turbulence in his wrists. So strong, he nearly tears them.
He cuts through the market and does not look at where he goes. Only knows that he is going.
Deep and dark into the back-roads of the city, this retch of spite strung in pitch inside him,until at last there is the murmur of a voice that curbs him within the unlit tunnel of an off-alley.
"Milord," it says, someplace beneath him. "Have you alms to spare? I am so hungry."
He turns, looks down. A beggar there, rooted into a growing puddle of ordure and rotgut.
Now, Thranduil stops. He smiles, almost kindly, revealing the onset of tines. He tucks his hair behind the point of one ear and says:
"Stand, and you may."
The beggar thanks him, invokes him to god and all things above. And stands. With difficulty. But not much, once Thranduil extends the length of one arm and grips him in his fist, the fluttering flutings of his larynx, squeezing and twisting until at last there is a burst and a welling of spume. Meat, blood and tendon. All, teeming through the open-rents of his fingers, soiling his cuff and his glove.
In silence, Thranduil watches. And when he feels he is fulfilled, and the blood wrapped on his arm has grown cold, he allows the beggar to fall back to where he was.
There, in his puddle.
oOo
Sometimes the stars of York are large and white, like pearls.
Sometimes they are small and grim. A starry leer that tells him, they are so far from him.
Legolas strains his eyes, at times, to see at least one in nights such as these. In such fog and mist, there are so few that glisten from the heavens.
It is the gentle swell of dimming hues, he supposes. The allness of embrace and the fragile dottings of the firmament, looming in velvet like a blanket that warms him and embraces, much like mother's hair.
Bottomless, and in cadence. Now that the sea has been taken from him.
He leans on the balustrade of his room, counting the inches that might separate him from the lapping dells of the quiet river below. Counting stories, the creases on his father's face once he looks down and finds him there, free. And dead.
His eyes trace the scope of the river's paling. The people that cross it with their fingers grazing on the polished iron, the lacy parasols balanced in the air, women in their gowns, telling poems, doe-eyed and tittering through lashes. It is late, but people must like it this way in England. What with the men with their canes and how they grin when there is a lady there to clasp their fingers with, someone to study in secret amid the initials of a kiss.
Once, Legolas had known a kiss. Once he'd snuck from under Thranduil's wing far enough to touch the white sand of Latvia's coast, and saw her there, waiting for him by the crags of Riga's greying shore. Tender-faced, much like his own. Her fingers through his hair, he swore he'd go with her, if only he could spurn his father and leave him to his solitude.
But then the tors sung. Whispers in his dreams. And she'd fallen sick—so sick she'd been, her fingernails torn and her red lips peeling—and so he could not bare his inability to keep her, to save her and to damn her, could not bare the unwinging of his father. And so he killed her.
He thinks now that he might have been one of those people on the bridge. Had he the courage to have unclung himself from the snare of Thranduil, long ago. So that he may be one to fawn above the River Ouse and attend its winter festivals. Be amongst the thrill of summer fairs, of Yuletide fetes, pondering, perhaps, his truest hope of daybreak.
But he cannot. Now that he is here, half-afraid and caged.
His eyes veer—someplace between his thoughts—and he sees a man there; clutching on to a woman's white-gloved palm, pressing it like his heart against his chest as they walked along the overpass.
There are silver lisles in her hair, like diamonds. Glinting through the moonlight. Pale and thin she is, but he holds her upright.
He is tall. Brown of hair that fell to length and calmly jaded.
She keens.
And in the anchor of his arms, she begins to cough, so loud and horribly that Legolas can hear her almost clearly from where he stands. She bends, the lisles dangling in violent disarray whilst the man at her side lowers himself to her and begins to whisper distant comforts into her long dark hair.
That's when Legolas sees it. There, hanging from her neck and into the frozen open air:
The silvern pendant of her necklace.
So bright. An offprint of a star. And the pavement, it is stippled red with drops of blood.
The woman is indeed furled frail in malady. And the man must adore her deeply, for he cradles her in his arms as if she were to dispense at any moment, with a look on his face that might have issued the promise that he would follow her where she went.
At last, her coughing simmers. The sheen of her necklace does not. She clutches it into her palm, and in her delicate grimace, there are many tears brimmed in her eyes, but on her lips, there is only a smile that she gives him.
Legolas watches them until they are gone from the bridge.
Until there are no stars left to find and no people left on the byways. And so he takes instead to sit upon his bed, staring at the woodwork of the walls.
oOo
He wonders what their two names might have been.
If ever, perhaps, they would walk the bridge again.
oOo
Thranduil returns late in the night.
He'd left the moment the sun had gone, and since the day before, Legolas had not seen him.
There is an open indent still on the middlemost of his lip from the gilded prong of his father's ring. And though the slit of it has dried, the gash, without feeding (and oh it has been so long that the famine of his thirst has at last begun to coil and contort like a serpent tethering in stone beneath his bones), will linger and remain.
He stands from his bed, the moment he hears the door of the foyer being shackled and slammed. He exits his room, making way towards the grand ascension of the staircase.
Legolas sees his father there, but does not address him.
He stands a few feet away. Not far from Thranduil's bent and tremoring figure, viewing him in silence.
From there, Legolas sees that his father's nails have clawed deep into the wood of the dining table. That his hair—a golden veil hinged upon the air—is slightly tangled and that the sleeves of his blazer are drenched wet with red.
Had he witnessed his father like this often, he would have simply spun on his heel and gone back to his room. But it is not the case. As few things could ever veer Thranduil from his impassive demeanor. Much less, stir him.
"Have you gone mad."
"Do not show your face to me," snarls Thranduil.
Legolas takes a step closer then. His hand hovering an inch above his father's shoulder. But Thranduil repels even the nuance, and instead snatches him firmly by the wrist, causing Legolas to step back in recoil.
In the light of the candles, pale and towering, Thranduil is as beautiful as he is horrifying.
Now Legolas thinks that there could only be one thing in all of the world that could possibly succeed in the shapeless incensing of his father. And for a moment, Legolas recalls almost clearly in the marked pictures of his mind, the way in which Thranduil had reacted the minute he had discovered his ongoing courtship of the farmer's black-skirted daughter, just months back.
Never had Legolas beheld such violence. Such ire in his eyes, a cold and freezing undergloom, alight.
To not have what is already had when Thranduil wants it most. The irrelevance of himself like a knife at the skin of his throat. His vanity undone and his wile, foundered. His lure unhanded and his vantage, scorned.
In that moment, Legolas understands that it is envy that gnarls the all-figure of his father.
That Thranduil has found for which to want.
Legolas knows this.
Learns this.
And smiles.
oOo